Question

I ran the following from a base folder ./

find . -name *.xvi.txt | sort

Which returns the following sort order:

./LT/filename.2004167.xvi.txt
./LT/filename.2004247.xvi.txt
./pred/2004186/filename.2004186.xvi.txt
./pred/2004202/filename.2004202.xvi.txt
./pred/2004222/filename.2004222.xvi.txt

As you can see, the filenames follow a regular structure, but the files themselves might be located in different parts of the directory structure. Is there a way of ignoring the folder names and/or directory structure so that the sort returns a list of folders/filenames based ONLY on the file names themselves? Like so:

./LT/filename.2004167.xvi.txt
./pred/2004186/filename.2004186.xvi.txt
./pred/2004202/filename.2004202.xvi.txt
./pred/2004222/filename.2004222.xvi.txt
./LT/filename.2004247.xvi.txt

I’ve tried a few different switches under the find and sort commands, but no luck. I could always copy everything out to a single folder and sort from there, but there are several hundred files, and I’m hoping that a more elegant option exists.

Thanks! Your help is appreciated.

Answer 1

find . -name *.xvi.txt | sort -t'.' -k3 -n

will sort it as you want. the only problem is if filename or directory name will include additinal dots.

To avoid it you can use :

find . -name *.xvi.txt | sed 's/[0-9]\+.xvi.txt$/\\&/' | sort -t'\' -k2 | sed 's/\\//'