Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi so I have these files where the first thing in them says something along the lines of "This document was accessed 'date' blah blah", I was thinking of a way to extract that date and then sort the files based on that date.

My question is how do I get rid of the words in that statement so that i could just have numbers left? and also there are sometimes particulars numbers i need to sort by so in perl how do you point to which place the number will be since I think the date formatt is constant.

Honestly I am not sure how to approach this problem I may just have my script take an argument of the date that I was to find and then go on from there but it would be really nice if someone could give me an idea of how to extract that date.

Thank you!

Can you post sample of the real data? "This document was accessed 'date' blah blah" is not really useful

yeah sry bout that. the messages go like this
"Last acessed 2011-06-24 by username at 07:32:55"

Basically right now I just get these files in an array and grep a certain argument like 2011-06. I don't really care about the exact time I just want the date.

If the string is always the same then try this...

Code:

sort -k3,3 -k7,7 file

This will sort the filenames in ascending order by date in first line:

Code:

perl -nlae '$F[2]=~s/-//g;$h{$ARGV}=$F[2] if $.==1;$.=0 if eof;END{$,="\n";print sort {$h{$a}<=>$h{$b}} keys %h}' *

Woah thank very much, honestly I have not tried it out yet since I have to integrate that into my script first.

What does the '-nlae' mean, or could you give a brief explanation on what is going on, I understand that ur taking the 3rd argument in the line which happens to be the date then ur doing something with that and then your doing a sort on the results..?

Thank you

I'll explain it after you confirm that it is giving proper results