Shell Programming and Scripting

I am using cat to collect data from hundreds of files with the following code:

Code:

cat *.dis > intree2

All my files have the extension .dis and are numbered:
Block1
Block2
Block3,
etc
I came to realize that my code is not adding the files in consecutive order. I need to make sure the content from file Block1.dis is at the very beggining of the output file followed by File Block2.dis so on and so forth. Is there any way I can force cat to do that precisely?
Thanks!

cat `ls *.dis` > intree2

"*" sorts files alphabetically. It is a feature of the original Bourne shell. You can check it with

Code:

echo *.dis

If you need some other order you can sort files before you cat them. How to do this depends on whether you have spaces (and other non-alphanum chars, not count "_" "-" ".") in names of your files or not. And, of course, on what order do you need.

PS When I said "How to do this" I basically meant how you can concatenate your files after sorting.
---------- Post updated at 10:23 AM ---------- Previous update was at 10:20 AM ----------

In general this is a bad advise:

Code:

cat `ls *.dis` > intree2

See: BashPitfalls - Greg's Wiki

Sorting hint: sort -k1.6n

Regards,
Alister

The problem is that file block1.dis is not being recognized as the firts file:

Code:

ls -sort *.dis

Output:
What should I do to force the code to recognize the file block1.dis to be the first one?

GNU ls has "-v" options which sorts exactly as you want. Or you can use a filter like this (assuming names of your files are blockN.dis):

Code:

ls *.dis | sed 's/[0-9]/ &/' | sort -n -k2 | sed 's/ //'

So:

Code:

cat `ls *.dis | sed 's/[0-9]/ &/' | sort -n -k2 | sed 's/ //'` >intree2

Or if your sort command can do it:

Code:

ls *.dis | sort -n -k1.6

Code:

cat `ls *.dis | sort -n -k1.6 | sed -e 's/;/;\n/g'`

Thanks !!