I have been trying to understand how the 'find' command lists the search results. I have a list of songs in different file formats (mp3, wav, aac etc) in a huge directory hierarchy organized by genre and am trying to get the list of all songs of a particular format.
I found ls -R command to be of no use, here (very surprisingly) and so tried the above set of commands
Cd to the top level 'Music' Directory first and then find command as follows:-
I expected the results to be displayed in alphabetical order and accordingly the first few entries came like this :
Code:
./English music/Savage Garden/Animal Song.WAV
./English music/Savage Garden/To the moon and back.WAV
./English music/Savage Garden/Truly Madly Deeply.WAV
./English music/U2/Original Of the species.WAV
...
Then suddenly in another directory, a very strange thing happened. It started displaying the result in a radom order (or so it appears)
Code:
./Hindi Music/Mere pass Tu Hai.WAV
./Hindi Music/Nach Le-Daler Mehndi.WAV
./Hindi Music/Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan-Afreen.WAV
./Hindi Music/Pal-KK.WAV
./Hindi Music/Kaawa Kaawa-Monsoon Wedding.WAV
./Hindi Music/Piya Haji Ali-Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.WAV
./Hindi Music/Baazigar Title Track.WAV
./Hindi Music/Carol-Unknown.WAV
./Hindi Music/Dekh Le-Munnabhai MBBS.WAV
How can a filename starting with the letter D come "after" the filename starting with letter N. So if its not alphabetical order, then what is it ? I am at a loss to understand this .
Could you please confirm waht you mean by "order in which they are physically stored in the directory ? Because if you read the directory listing, you will still read it in an alphanumeric order.
Could you please confirm what you mean by "order in which they are physically stored in the directory ? Because if you read the directory listing, you will still read it in an alphanumeric order.
Reading "the directory listing" is not the same thing as reading "the directory".
The ls utility (which produces a directory listing) sorts its output by filename by default. It will also produce listings that are sorted by file size, by one of the three time stamps on the file, or unsorted depending on the options you give to ls. If you use the commandls -lfyou will get a list of files in the current directory in long format listed in the order in which those files appear in the directory (i.e., unsorted).
I ran ls -lf on the directory which was giving some random order reading as processed by find
Code:
ajayram@pc13:/media/HITACHI/Music/Hindi Music$ ls -1f *.WAV
Aaja re-Bend It Like Beckham.WAV
Baazigar Title Track.WAV
Carol-Unknown.WAV
Dekh Le-Munnabhai MBBS.WAV
Dil Nahin Lagta-Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.WAV
Do Dil Mil Rahein Hain-Pardes.WAV
Gurus Of Peace.WAV
Jaan Leva.WAV
Jal Jal Ke-Sonu Nigam.WAV
Janabeali-Unknown.WAV
Jheelon Ka Sheher-Mission Kashmir.WAV
Kaawa Kaawa-Monsoon Wedding.WAV
Kaho Na Kaho-Murder.WAV
Mere pass Tu Hai.WAV
Nach Le-Daler Mehndi.WAV
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan-Afreen.WAV
Pal-KK.WAV
Piya Haji Ali-Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.WAV
Shaan-Take me to the heart.WAV
Tishnagi-Shaan.WAV
Tum mere Bahon me Aan na sake.WAV
Again I find that ls -1f gives the alphabetical order of filenames, whereas if you see my earlier post, find command gives some random order.. Could someone clarify this ?
I said to run ls with the l (letter 'l', not digit '1') and f options with no operands. However, using either -1f or -lf will be fine. But, by specifying a globbing pattern as an operand to ls, the shell that invoked ls expanded *.WAV into a sorted list of filenames before calling ls. It will also work as I intended if you specify one or more operands that are the pathnames of files of type directory.
I repeat: run the command ls -lf(with no file operands) in a directory in which find reported .WAV files that were not in sorted order. It won't produce a listing of just .WAV files and it won't search subdirectories, but it will give you a listing of all files in that directory in unsorted directory order.
Also note that the find command you provided in your 1st posting on this thread:
Code:
find -name *.WAV
is using a non-standard extension I've never seen before. On standard versions of the find utility, the first argument to the find utility would have to be the name of a directory.
Since you didn't quote *.WAVI also have to assume that there were either no .WAV files or only one .WAV files in that directory. Otherwise, the shell would have expanded *.WAV and would have generated another syntax error in find.
[...]
Also note that the find command you provided in your 1st posting on this thread:
Code:
find -name *.WAV
is using a non-standard extension I've never seen before. On standard versions of the find utility, the first argument to the find utility would have to be the name of a directory.
[...]
Just to add that GNU find defaults to the current directory if no path(s) is/are given (man 1 find):
Code:
$ find --version
GNU find version 4.2.27
Code:
OPTIONS
The '-H', '-L' and '-P' options control the treatment of symbolic links. Command-line arguments following these
are taken to be names of files or directories to be examined, up to the first argument that begins with '-', '(',
')', ',', or '!'. That argument and any following arguments are taken to be the expression describing what is to
be searched for. If no paths are given, the current directory is used. If no expression is given, the expres-
sion '-print' is used (but you should probably consider using '-print0' instead, anyway).
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find command listing