UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

hi,

i want to rename all the file names in order so that they can be sorted later.
For example, my filenames are like path\1, path\2...path\10, path\11.
But when I sort them, it sorts by the first number, so path\1 gets sorted with path\10.
I'm guessing the best way to do this is to rename the single digits to something like \01, \02...
So would this be the correct input?
sed 's///1///01/' file
sed 's///2///02/' file
sed 's///3///03/' file

and so on. A problem I might encounter with this is that if my filenames go into the
3-digits (ie. 330), then I'll have to rename them to 001, 002, and so on. any suggestions?

thanks,
Gammmaman

If the files are all in one directory:

Code:

cd /path 
ls -1 | sort -n >> sorted.lis
cd -

thanks for the reply. The sort I'm trying to do is done through a file that lists the filepaths. I don't have access to the actual path. Can this be done?

thanks,
gammaman

In that case, you just have to do this:

Code:

sort -n file_that_lists_the_filenames > sorted.lis

Note that I have said filenames, and not paths. You can use sed/awk to extract the filenames from the full paths.

Using sed, you can't change the actual file names. Though the text file containing the files can be modified, later on, mapping between a name and its (supposedly) corresponding file will fail.

Say path/1 is the actual file name. In the text file, you change the name to path/01. Now you are talking about two different files viz. path/1 and path/01. So, I think it is better you pick up those 9 files and rename them. And then sort.



vino

try a tag sort like this:

Code:

# create a tmpfile with two fields
#  short file name
#  full file name
> tmpfile
while read file
do
      echo "`basename $file`  $file" >> tmpfile
done < filelist
# sort the tmp file
sort -n -o tmpfile tmpfile
# print just the full file name in sorted order 
awk ' {print $2} ' tmpfile > newsortedfilelist