Linux find sort by name

Sorting the output of «find -print0» by piping to the «sort» command

I need to be able to alphabetically sort the output of find before piping it to a command. Entering | sort | between didn’t work, so what could I do?

find folder1 folder2 -name "*.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 myCommand 

6 Answers 6

Use find as usual and delimit your lines with NUL. GNU sort can handle these with the -z switch:

find . -print0 | sort -z | xargs -r0 yourcommand 

It does not seem to work with find . -name ‘*.dat’ -type f -printf ‘%f\n’ | sort -z | xargs -r0 > output.txt . Is my line wrong due to the printf?

Some versions of sort have a -z option, which allows for null-terminated records.

find folder1 folder2 -name "*.txt" -print0 | sort -z | xargs -r0 myCommand 

Additionally, you could also write a high-level script to do it:

find folder1 folder2 -name "*.txt" -print0 | python -c 'import sys; sys.stdout.write("\0".join(sorted(sys.stdin.read().split("\0"))))' | xargs -r0 myCommand 

Add the -r option to xargs to make sure that myCommand is called with an argument.

Good one (two?). Interestingly, though, the two methods handle . differently. With sort it winds up at the end of the list. with python it sorts to the top. (maybe python sorts with LC_COLLATE=C )

The problem with all these |sort solutions is that you cannot use -exec any longer. OK, although it is possible to rewrite your statement given to -exec so that it works with xargs , the question is, what about «mini-scripts»? ( sh -c . ) I wouldn’t call that trivial to transform a ‘sh -c’ mini-script with multiple commands so that it can work with xargs (if possible at all, that is)

@syntaxerror: What problem do you have using sh -c with xargs? printf %s\\n a b c d e | xargs -n3 sh -c ‘printf %s, «$@»; printf \\n’ x

I think you need the -n flag for sort#

-n, --numeric-sort compare according to string numerical value 

The print0 may have something to do with this, I just tested this. Take the print0 out, you can null terminate the string in sort using the -z flag

Well, that print0 appears to be space-separating the filenames which is what I need to pass to my command, unfortunately

If you have GNU Parallel http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/ installed you can do this:

find folder1 folder2 -name "*.txt" -print | sort | parallel myCommand 

You can install GNU Parallel simply by:

wget http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parallel.git/plain/src/parallel chmod 755 parallel cp parallel sem 

I don’t understand that last statement. I create a file with a line break in the file name and execute your command: cd /tmp && touch $’a\nz’ && ls && find -maxdepth 1 -print | sort | parallel echo . Total false output. I know GNU Parallel now, but that answer misses the original question, doesn’t it?

I know that it is bad practice to use crazy characters in file names — I am already including the blank space. I just see that parallel has a -0 parameter. Nice. No downvote. find -maxdepth 1 -print0 | sort -z | parallel -0 echo .

@uav In my 25 years of sysadmin I have never seen a user making a file with \n. I have seen plenty of files with ‘ space and «. So unless you have evil users or a filesystem with error, I will reckon you will not meet a file with \n that was not made by a fellow sysadm.

Some implementation of find supports ordered traversal directly via the -s parameter:

-s Cause find to traverse the file hierarchies in lexicographical order, i.e., alphabetical order within each directory. Note: `find -s' and `find | sort' may give different results. 

Some solutions here don’t work correctly because the sort command takes the full «path» string to sorting instead of the filename string.

This is a quite complicated but working example of natural sorting results of the «find» command:

find every_minute -type f -name "*.sh" -printf '%f\t%p\n' | sort -V -k1 | cut -d$'\t' -f2 | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -r0 -I <> echo 'Found: "<>"' 

Found: "every_minute/api/1_build_synonyms.sh" Found: "every_minute/search_module/2_rotate_index.sh" Found: "every_minute/api/3_check_synonyms.sh" Found: "every_minute/api/4_run_schedule.sh" Found: "every_minute/search_module/10_test.sh" 

Example of an invalid find every_minute -type f -name «*.sh» | sort -z | xargs -r0 echo command result:

every_minute/api/1_build_synonyms.sh every_minute/api/3_check_synonyms.sh every_minute/api/4_run_schedule.sh every_minute/search_module/10_test.sh every_minute/search_module/2_rotate_index.sh 

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How to sort the output of find? [duplicate]

I’m using the find command to list files with their name containing a string: find ~/ -type f -name «*inductive*» I would like to use a pipe to sort the resulting list of files. I would like to be able to sort by file size, date created, date accessed . How can I do this? Thanks.

this question might help: superuser.com/questions/416308/… essentially, you put what you want to sort on as the first field by editing the output format, then sort the outputs

@geewee The answers to Birth is empty on ext4 offer ways around this issue with «birth time» — The field gets populated (see below) only coreutils stat does not display it. — You can get the creation time via debugfs . I combined this into a simple shell function .

1 Answer 1

Sorting the output by creation time is impossible in Linux ( ctime is not file creation date). stat has the ability to show a file’s birth time using the %w and %W format tags, but they always show — and 0 , respectively, even on filesystems that store creation time/birth time. Hence, it is practically useless for this purpose on Linux.

The other two sorting orders are possible, though:

# Sort by size: find ~/ -type f -name "*inductive* -exec ls -ltu <> \; | sort -k 5 -n # Sort by access time: find ~/ -type f -name "*inductive* -exec ls -ltu <> \; | sort -k 6 -M 

You can add the -r flag to sort to reverse the sorting order. See man sort for more information.

Depending on the size of find ‘s output, it may take some time for sort to produce sorted output.

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How to sort the results of find (including nested directories) alphabetically in bash

I have a list of directories based on the results of running the «find» command in bash. As an example, the result of find are the files:

test/a/file test/b/file test/file test/z/file 

test/file test/a/file test/b/file test/z/file 

4 Answers 4

If you have the GNU version of find, try this:

find test -type f -printf '%h\0%d\0%p\n' | sort -t '\0' -n | awk -F '\0' '' 

To use these file names in a loop, do

find test -type f -printf '%h\0%d\0%p\n' | sort -t '\0' -n | awk -F '\0' '' | while read file; do # use $file done 

The find command prints three things for each file: (1) its directory, (2) its depth in the directory tree, and (3) its full name. By including the depth in the output we can use sort -n to sort test/file above test/a/file . Finally we use awk to strip out the first two columns since they were only used for sorting.

Using \0 as a separator between the three fields allows us to handle file names with spaces and tabs in them (but not newlines, unfortunately).

$ find test -type f test/b/file test/a/file test/file test/z/file $ find test -type f -printf '%h\0%d\0%p\n' | sort -t '\0' -n | awk -F'\0' '' test/file test/a/file test/b/file test/z/file 

If you are unable to modify the find command, then try this convoluted replacement:

find test -type f | while read file; do printf '%s\0%s\0%s\n' "$" "$(tr -dc / ' 

It does the same thing, with $ being used to get a file’s directory name and the tr command being used to count the number of slashes, which is equivalent to a file’s «depth».

(I sure hope there’s an easier answer out there. What you’re asking doesn’t seem that hard, but I am blanking on a simple solution.)

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How to find files in subdirs and sort them by filename in a single command?

which means output is sorted based on filename only, but folder information should be maintained as part of the output. Edit: Make example more complicated as the subdirectory structure may include more than one level.

@camh — if possible I would like to use only unix commands. In any case my question is pretty much a duplicate of yours. Can you transfer the best solution to this thread (keep a link to the original anyways) so I can mark is as the solution?

If @Shawn makes the changes I suggested in my comment (use -printf instead of awk ), I think that is the best solution. I’ve reworked my original implementation to use this method.

3 Answers 3

You need to sort by the last field (considering / as a field separator). Unfortunately, I can’t think of a tool that can do this when the number of fields varies (if only sort -k could take negative values).

To get around this, you’ll have to do a decorate-sort-undecorate. That is, take the filename and put it at the beginning followed by a field separator, then do a sort, then remove the first column and field separator.

find . ! -path "./build*" -name "*.txt" |\ awk -vFS=/ -vOFS=/ '< print $NF,$0 >' |\ sort -n -t / |\ cut -f2- -d/ 

That awk command says the field separator FS is set to / ; this affects the way it reads fields. The output field separator OFS is also set to / ; this affects the way it prints records. The next statement says print the last column ( NF is the number of fields in the record, so it also happens to be the index of the last field) as well as the whole record ( $0 is the whole record); it will print them with the OFS between them. Then the list is sort ed, treating / as the field separator — since we have the filename first in the record, it will sort by that. Then the cut prints only fields 2 through the end, again treating / as the field separator.

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How do I sort the output of find?

In below snippet, I merge a number of files with newlines inbetween. However the order of the files doesn’t represent my directory structure. Calling sort as shown below doesnt work. What am I doing wrong?

find ./lib/app -type f | sort | \ xargs awk 'ENDFILE ' > myFile 

./lib/app/b/file ./lib/app/config.json ./lib/app/d/file 

./lib/app/config.json ./lib/app/b/file ./lib/app/d/file 

please define better. note that your 2 line sample could be sorted by subdirs. As you’ve rejected that solution, then you want to sort by filename? (i.e. config.json, template.tpl)? Good luck.

Unless you’re careless enough to use a sea-shell derivative ( tcsh etc), the backslash at the end of the line is unnecessary. Not actually harmful, just unnecessary.

4 Answers 4

find ./lib/app -type f | sort | tee myFile 

You’re saying that find ./lib/app -type f | sort does not display in sorted order? That’s pretty much impossible. What does it show?

Something like this: ./lib/js/app/templates/test.tpl ./lib/js/app/app.coffee ./lib/js/app/views/header.coffee , ignoring the order of my directory structure

@Industrial What locale variables do you have set? Does using find . | LC_ALL=C sort sort the way you want? Are there some hidden non-printable characters that snuck into directory/file names somehow?

It appears that you want the files in a sub-directory listed before any files in a sub-sub-directory. That’s not a standard sort at all. I think that the algorithm should be, conceptually:

1. If the longest common initial sub-path between two filenames is X , then the names are X/A and X/B .
2. If both A and B contain one or more slashes, do a straight string comparison (of A and B ).
3. Else if neither A nor B contains a slash, do a straight string comparison (of A and B ).
4. Else if A contains a slash and B does not, sort B before A .
5. Else ( B contains a slash and A does not, so) sort A before B .

• F1 = ./lib/app/b/file
• F2 = ./lib/app/config.json
• F3 = ./lib/app/d/file
• F4 = ./lib/app/b/a/file
• F5 = ./lib/app/b/other

Names X A B Rule Result F1, F2 ./lib/app/ b/file config.json 4 F2 < F1 F1, F3 ./lib/app/ b/file d/file 2 F1 < F3 F1, F4 ./lib/app/b/ file a/file 5 F1 < F4 F1, F5 ./lib/app/b file other 3 F1 < F5 F2, F3 ./lib/app/ config.json d/file 5 F2 < F3 F2, F4 ./lib/app/ config.json b/a/file 5 F2 < F4 F2, F5 ./lib/app/ config.json b/other 5 F2 < F5 F3, F4 ./lib/app/ d/file b/a/file 2 F4 < F3 F3, F5 ./lib/app/ d/file b/other 2 F5 < F3 F4, F5 ./lib/app/b a/file other 3 F5 < F3 

#!/usr/bin/env perl use strict; use warnings; my @files; while (<>) < chomp; push @files, $_; >sub pathsorter < my(@abits) = split /\//, $a; my(@bbits) = split /\//, $b; my $na = scalar(@abits); my $nb = scalar(@bbits); my $nbits = (($na < $nb) ? $na : $nb) - 1; my $i; for ($i = 0; $i < $nbits; $i++) < last if ($abits[$i] ne $bbits[$i]); ># abits[0..$i] == bbits[0..$i] == X return $a cmp $b if ($i < $nbits); return $a cmp $b if ($na == $nb && $i == $nbits); return -1 if ($na < $nb); return +1 if ($na >$nb); return 0; > print "$_\n" foreach (sort pathsorter @files); 

./lib/app/b/file ./lib/app/config.json ./lib/base/basename ./lib/app/d/file ./lib/app/b/a/file ./lib/app/b/other ./lib/app/animosity ./lib/base/basename 

./lib/app/animosity ./lib/app/config.json ./lib/app/b/file ./lib/app/b/other ./lib/app/b/a/file ./lib/app/d/file ./lib/base/basename ./lib/base/basename 

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