sort file list

davestiff has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: sort file list by davido (Cardinal) on Apr 27, 2004 at 19:54 UTC
This particular method is tried and proven, and should get you going in the right direction. `my @files = <DATA>; chomp @files; my @sorted = map { $_->[0] } sort { $a->[1] cmp $b->[1] } map { [ $_ , ( split /\s+/, $_ )[-1] ] } @files; print "$_\n" for @sorted; __DATA__ 1999-12-07 12:00p 3,856 abc.dll 2002-02-24 09:30p 260,096 xyz.dll 2004-03-19 01:29p 992,907 lmo.dll 2004-04-08 03:23p 24,576 efg.dll 2004-03-11 0804a 1,036,288 stu.dll` [download] For an explanation, look up Schwartzian Transform. This is, of course, just One Way To Do It. Here come the rest.......... Dave	[reply] [d/l]
Re: sort file list by Limbic~Region (Chancellor) on Apr 27, 2004 at 19:55 UTC
davestiff, I am not sure I understand. Do you have a file that contains lines that look like you have shown and want to sort them alphabetically by file name? `#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; my %file; while ( <DATA> ) { chomp; my @info = split " "; $file{ $info[3] } = $_; } print "$file{$_}\n" for sort keys %file; __DATA__ 1999-12-07 12:00p 3,856 abc.dll 2002-02-24 09:30p 260,096 xyz.dll 2004-03-19 01:29p 992,907 lmo.dll 2004-04-08 03:23p 24,576 efg.dll 2004-03-11 08:04a 1,036,288 stu.dll` [download] Or do you have a list of files that you want to get additional information for in alphabetical order: `#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; for ( sort glob "*.dll" ) { print "$_ : ", -s, "\n"; }` [download] See perldoc -f stat for more information if this is what you were after. Cheers - L~R	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: sort file list by matija (Priest) on Apr 27, 2004 at 19:54 UTC
First you have to decide how you'll get the name of the file from that line. Since it's the last entry on the line, you could use split: `@arr=sort {split(/\s+/,$a)[-1] cmp split(/\s+/,$b)} @arr;` [download] Note that this code is very inefficient: it splits each string each time it has to make a comparison during sorting. But you should be alright as long as you only have hundreds of files in a listing. It also fails if the filenames have blanks in them. For a more serious routine, you could pick the line apart with a regular expression, change the array into a list of lists that contains the filename as one element and the original line as the other, sort based on the filename element, and in the final step throw the filename away, leaving the sorted list of lines. This is known as Schwartzian transform.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: sort file list by Anonymous Monk on Apr 27, 2004 at 21:33 UTC
Just in case you used the MS-DOS `dir` command to get this list: Have a look at `dir /?` and try `dir [...] /on` which sorts the files in alphabetical order.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: sort file list by cyocum (Curate) on Apr 27, 2004 at 22:48 UTC
Do not forget that you can use the glob function to get all the file names that end in .dll then use the file test operators to get that information then do the alpha sort.	[reply]