Shell Programming and Scripting

I am sure it has been answered in some form or the other in this forum but trust me I have spent last couple of hours looking for an answer but can't find it.

I want to do a very simple operation within my script.

Let's say I have 4 files with the names file1.log, file2.log, file3.log and file4.log. I want to do a listing of file*.log and store the highest name (in this case file4.log) in a variable. I have this in the script:

flist=$(ls file*.log)
which gives me a string or list in the format "file1.log file2.log file3.log file4.log.
How do I parse this string or file and store file4.log to a variable, say fname.

Thanks a lot in advance for the help.

this helps?

Code:

ls *.log| sort -u |tail -1

Absolutely. That did it. Thanks a lot.......

Folks here are real gurus. They have answers to just about anything.
For someone like me who is totally new to Unix, this forum is a bliss.

sort -n or sort -u ?

Neither sort will work if you get more than 9 files unless the single digit numbers have a 0 before their number (01... 09, etc)

Code:

(examples)
# touch file{1,2,5,10,15,20}.log
# ls *.log| sort -u | tail -1
file5.log
# ls *.log| sort -n | tail -1
file5.log
#

sort -V works, but so does ls -v without the need for sort

Code:

# ls *.log | sort -V | tail -1
file20.log
# ls -v *.log | tail -1
file20.log
#

Thanks fubaya for the clarification.
"ls -u" worked for me as the numbers in the files I am working with have a four digit number that will always stay as four digit. So, I will not have any issues with it. However, it is really good to know to use "ls _V" or "ls -v" to be on the safe side. Curiously, options -v and -V are not documented in the manual pages I get by typing "man sort".

Thanks again. Really appreciate.

If (as we now now) you have files of the form filennnn.log (where nnnn) is a four-digit number with leading zeros, the sort is not needed.

Code:

ls -1 file????.log 2>/dev/null| tail -1

Btw. The -v and -V switches referred to by "fubayer" are non-standard (whatever that means nowadays). But we don't know what O/S either of you are running.