Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi experts,

I am facing a problem right now.I have to automate the pickup of files based on a priority.The scenario is as below:

1) There will be files from Mon-Fri with Mon file being named as abc_def_01_YYYYMMDD and Tue file being abc_def_02_YYYYMMDD and so forth till Friday's file which would be abc_def_YYYYMMDD.

2) I have to set a priority such that if on any given day if i have more than one file, I have to send the earlier file first.For instance if on Thursday i have monday's file and wednesday's file I have to send the Monday's file first, then after a pre-defined delay send Wednesday's file-delay- and then send the thursday's file.

3) The trigger for the script is the file itself.Incoming file will trigger the script.

To start with, I have written the following code which stores the filenames in separate variables:

Code:

#!/sh/bin

cd /location

for i in `ls -lrt /location | awk '{print $9}'`
do

if [ "`echo $i | awk '{print $1}' | cut -d'_' -f3`" = "01" ]; then
   first_file="$i"
elif [ "`echo $i | awk '{print $1}' | cut -d'_' -f3`" = "02" ]; then
   second_file="$i"
elif [ "`echo $i | awk '{print $1}' | cut -d'_' -f3`" = "03" ]; then
   third_file="$i"
elif [ "`echo $i | awk '{print $1}' | cut -d'_' -f3`" = "04" ]; then
   fourth_file="$i"
elif [ "`echo $i | awk '{print $1}' | cut -d'_' -f3`" = "05" ]; then
   fifth_file="$i"
else
echo "i am in the else loop" >> /dev/null
fi

done

Having done this i dont know how to set the priority so that at any given day if there is more than one file, the file of the earlier day of the week should be sent first.

Kindly help me on this.Thanks in advance

Seems like all you need is something like:

Code:

ls -tr /incoming/* | while read f
  do
    ( whatever you do to process $f )
    mv $f /archive
  done

If you cannot trust modify time, you need to extract the date from the file name in a sortable order, prefix the file name with the key, sort and extract the file name from each output line.

Code:

ls incoming/* | sed 's/.*\(_20[0-9][0-9][[01][0-9][0-3][0-9].*\)/\1 &/' | sort | while read k f do
    ( whatever you do to process $f )
    mv $f /archive
  done

If you can name them something like constant_stuff+YYYYMMDDHHMMSS+variable_stuff, they sort right using shell glob '*'.