Question

I’m searching through a number of directories for “searchstring”, and then running a script on each $file:

for file in `find $dir -name ${searchstring}'*'`;
do
    echo $file >> $debug
    script.sh $file >> $output
done

My $debug file yields the following:

/root/0007_searchstring/out/filename_20120105_020000.log
/root/0006_searchstring/out/filename_20120105_010000.log
/root/0005_searchstring/out/filename_20120105_013000.log
(filename is _yyyymmdd_hhmmss.log)
…

Is there a way to get find to order by filename or by mktime? Should I pipe find to sort first? Make an array then sort it as per this question?

Answer 1

If you want to ignore the directory path and just use the file name, then you should be able to use:

for file in `find $dir -name ${searchstring}'*' | sort --field-separator=/ --key=4`;