Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi, I'm trying to write a ksh script to copy a specified number of files from one directory to another.

The files are named in the convention <switchname>_log.<num> and the numbers are sequential single digit onwards. I figured I could find some parameter for ls which would list the files in correct order but having searched high and low i cannot figure this one out.

I consistently get -

<switchname>_log.1
<switchname>_log.10
<switchname>_log.11
<switchname>_log.12
<switchname>_log.13
<switchname>_log.14
<switchname>_log.15
<switchname>_log.16
<switchname>_log.17
<switchname>_log.18
<switchname>_log.19
<switchname>_log.2
<switchname>_log.20

etc.

I want to do a couple of things - firstly I want to write a script which moves the first numerically sequenced file from the directory, I will then put this in some sort of loop so it does it every 5 minutes for each of 12 directories.

Secondly I want to to be able to do this as a one off taking the first X number of each switch's files to copy elsewhere.

HELP PLEASE!

something to start with:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh

ls *_log.*([0-9]*) | nawk -F'.' '{print $NF, $0}' | sort -n | cut -d ' ' -f2-

Thanks, that gives me the listing I want.

How do I now grab the first list element (or the first X list elements) and cp it/them out?

and here's something to start with:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
for iter in $(ls *_log.*([0-9]*) | sed -e 's#^\([^_][^_]*\).*#\1#g'|sort -u)
do
   echo ${iter}
done

you can experiment with this and with the previous posting.