CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashfind
Shahin
Shahin

Reputation: 1316

Passing multiple files using zcat and a for loop to a command

I have a directory structure like this:

Y1/year1fileA.txt.gz
Y1/year1fileB.txt.gz
Y2/year2fileA.txt.gz
Y2/year2fileB.txt.gz
Y3/year3fileA.txt.gz
Y3/year3fileB.txt.gz
Y4/year4fileA.txt.gz
Y4/year4fileB.txt.gz
...

I was planning on passing the <(zcat ./Y1/year1fileA.txt.gz ./Y2/year2fileA.txt.gz ...) in that order into another command that expects FILE and not stdin.

I thought of using: command <(find . -name "*fileA*.gz" -exec zcat {})

After running it, I realized the files where not passed into zcat in a sorted fashion (i.e. year4fileA.txt.gz was written before year1fileA.txt.gz)

Is there a way to use find and sort these files before passing to zcat? Or should I use for loops? or xargs?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 232

Answers (1)

John Kugelman
John Kugelman

Reputation: 361585

find doesn't sort its output, but globs do. A glob that matches all of the files at once ought to suffice:

cmd <(zcat Y*/year*file*.txt.gz)

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions