First off, very well done so far. You worked most of it out, but you made it more complicated for you than necessary.

Actually they don't have to sort correctly - i gave you a two-step plan how to produce a filelist first and then work through that list with a loop:

Code:

find ~/Desktop/New Testament -name "*txt" -type f -print > listfile
rm resultfile ; while read file ; do cat $file spacerfile >> resultfile ; done <listfile

The second line will work through the listfile (actually a list of filenames, one every line) sequentially, but "find" will probably not write the files into the list in the order you want. This is why i told you to reorder the listfile by reordering the files - you would just have to move the lines around.

At second thought, you don't even have to move the lines around, there is a utility for that: "sort". So, here is what you do:

1. Prepare the initial listfile:

Code:

find ~/Desktop/New Testament -name "*txt" -type f -print > listfile

The result will probably look like this:

Code:

/home/user/Desktop/New Testament/Colossians/Colossians1.txt
/home/user/Desktop/New Testament/Colossians/Colossians2.txt
/home/user/Desktop/New Testament/Colossians/Colossians3.txt
/home/user/Desktop/New Testament/Colossians/Colossians4.txt
/home/user/Desktop/New Testament/John/John1.txt
/home/user/Desktop/New Testament/Mark/Mark1.txt
...

2. Sort the listfile

Now this is not sorted canonically, because Mark and John come before all the letters. Use your editor to add an order number at the beginning of the line:

Code:

3 /home/user/Desktop/New Testament/Colossians/Colossians1.txt
4 /home/user/Desktop/New Testament/Colossians/Colossians2.txt
5 /home/user/Desktop/New Testament/Colossians/Colossians3.txt
6 /home/user/Desktop/New Testament/Colossians/Colossians4.txt
2 /home/user/Desktop/New Testament/John/John1.txt
1 /home/user/Desktop/New Testament/Mark/Mark1.txt
...

Never mind that the numbers will not have all the same number of digits. For the niftly little tool i show you now this is just peanuts: "sort". This, you guessed it, sorts things - not only alphabetically, but also numerically. Read the man page of "sort" and you will see how much it can do.

So, after you have added the numbers, use "sort" to sort the file:

Code:

sort -nk1 listfile > listfile.sorted

Your file should now look like this:

Code:

1 /home/user/Desktop/New Testament/Mark/Mark1.txt
2 /home/user/Desktop/New Testament/John/John1.txt
3 /home/user/Desktop/New Testament/Colossians/Colossians1.txt
4 /home/user/Desktop/New Testament/Colossians/Colossians2.txt
5 /home/user/Desktop/New Testament/Colossians/Colossians3.txt
6 /home/user/Desktop/New Testament/Colossians/Colossians4.txt
..

Check the file again with an editor, to see if all worked out. Note, that you still have the listfile, so you can change the numbers in there and re-run the "sort" command if not everything is to your satisfaction.

3. Concatenate the files

Finally use the sorted listfile to create the output. As we have added numbers we need to modify the loop i showed you slightly:

Code:

rm resultfile ; while read num file ; do cat $file spacerfile >> resultfile ; done <listfile.sorted

If your files are well-formed you can remove the spacerfile from the call:

Code:

rm resultfile ; while read num file ; do cat $file >> resultfile ; done <listfile.sorted

A few words about your solution:

You shouldn't use perl for that. "perl" is a full-blown programming language - a full orchestra of its own. You don't invite a whole orchestra and then tell them you need only one triangle player, for the other instruments you have an orchestra of your own. You can use perl to do all you want to do and if you prefer "perl" above shell code that is ok. But don't write shell code and then use "perl" as a simple regex machine. The shell has its own regexp machines for that (sed, awk, ...).

The usual way is to use the regexp to create teh modified name, store this information in a variable and then use this variable content to change the filename. See below.

"rename" is probably a "perl"-command and internal to this language. In shell code you use "mv", which is short for "move".

The sketch for renaming files would look like this:

Code:

<some pipeline providing a list of filenames> | while read filename ; do
     filenew="$(echo "$filename" | sed 's/\([a-z]\)\([0-9]\)\.txt/\10\2.txt/')
     mv "$filename" "$filenew"
done

I hope this helps.

bakunin