CODEWITHSUNDEEP
shellunix
Madvick
Madvick

Reputation: 11

How to sort files by modified timestamp in unix for a shellscript to pick them one at a time

I am writing a shell script that picks one file at a time and processes them. I want the script to pick files in the ascending order of their modified time.

I used the code below to pick .csv files with a particular filename pattern.

for file in /filepath/file*.csv
do
  #mystuff
done

But I expect the script to pick .csv files according to the ascending order of their modified time. Please suggest.

Thanks in advance

Upvotes: 1

Views: 173

Answers (3)

Ahmed
Ahmed

Reputation: 345

with your loop "for"

for file in "`ls -tr /filepath/file*.csv`"
do
  mystuff $file 
done

Upvotes: 0

Bodo
Bodo

Reputation: 9855

If you are sure the file names don't contain any "strange" characters, e.g. newline, you could use the sorting capability of ls and read the output with a while read... loop. This will also work for file names that contain spaces.

ls -tr1 /filepath/file*.csv | while read -r file
do
    mystuff "$file"
done

Note this solution should be preferred over something like
for file in $(ls -tr /filepath/file*.csv) ...
because this will fail if you have a file name that contains a space due to the word-splitting involved here.

Upvotes: 1

Josh Beauregard
Josh Beauregard

Reputation: 2749

You can return the results of ls -t as an array. (-t sorts by modified time)

csvs=($(ls -t /filepath/file*.csv))

Then apply your for loop.

for file in $csvs
do
  #mystuff
done

Upvotes: 0

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