Getting thousands to list before hundreds

[Ajihood]

Hi guys,

Sorry if this is a bit of a novice question but I need file names in the form obj10**.fits to list before obj9**.fits, where ** are just numbers.

At the moment, obj1000 lists before obj999 due to the 1. Is there any quick way to get the files with thousands to list after files with hundreds?

I thought about adding a zero to the front of each hundred, ie to get obj0999, but I dont know a quick way I could do that to work on hundreds of files.

Thanks for any help!

[sgosnell]

Adding leading zeros is the quickest way I know of. Batch (or bulk) renaming of files isn't that hard, and Google should help with that. Lots of how-tos show up in a Google search. You'll need a script to test for the first number, and add a zero if it's not a 1, nothing if it is. That's assuming the numbers are all above 100. If they start from 1, it gets more complicated, but still possible.

[Rubberman]

It is as sgosnell said - you need to add leading zeros to the number since file names are sorted alphabetically, and naturally '9' is after '1'...

[drl]

Hi.

This may not always work, but will handle simple cases like this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# @(#) s1	Demonstrate ls sort by "version".

pe() { for _i;do printf "%s" "$_i";done; printf "\n"; }
pl() { pe;pe "-----" ;pe "$*"; }
db() { ( printf " db, ";for _i;do printf "%s" "$_i";done;printf "\n" ) >&2 ; }
db() { : ; }
C=$HOME/bin/context && [ -f $C ] && $C ls

# Create data files.
touch data999 data1000

pl " Results, default order:"
ls -lgG data*

pl " Results, sort by \"version\":"
ls -v -lgG data*

exit 0

producing:

$ ./s1

Environment: LC_ALL = C, LANG = C
(Versions displayed with local utility "version")
OS, ker|rel, machine: Linux, 2.6.32-71.29.1.el6.i686, i686
Distribution        : CentOS Linux release 6.0 (Final)
GNU bash 4.1.2
ls (GNU coreutils) 8.4

-----
 Results, default order:
-rw-r--r--. 1 0 Jan  7 05:38 data1000
-rw-r--r--. 1 0 Jan  7 05:38 data999

-----
 Results, sort by "version":
-rw-r--r--. 1 0 Jan  7 05:38 data999
-rw-r--r--. 1 0 Jan  7 05:38 data1000

See info ls for details ... cheers, drl

(Recently posted on LQ, I seem to recall.)

( edit 1: post results as run on CentOS rather than Debian )