How to sort the results of find (including nested directories) alphabetically in bash
If you have the GNU version of find, try this:
find test -type f -printf '%h\0%d\0%p\n' | sort -t '\0' -n | awk -F '\0' '{print $3}'
To use these file names in a loop, do
find test -type f -printf '%h\0%d\0%p\n' | sort -t '\0' -n | awk -F '\0' '{print $3}' | while read file; do
# use $file
done
The find command prints three things for each file: (1) its directory, (2) its depth in the directory tree, and (3) its full name. By including the depth in the output we can use sort -n
to sort test/file
above test/a/file
. Finally we use awk
to strip out the first two columns since they were only used for sorting.
Using \0
as a separator between the three fields allows us to handle file names with spaces and tabs in them (but not newlines, unfortunately).
$ find test -type f
test/b/file
test/a/file
test/file
test/z/file
$ find test -type f -printf '%h\0%d\0%p\n' | sort -t '\0' -n | awk -F'\0' '{print $3}'
test/file
test/a/file
test/b/file
test/z/file
If you are unable to modify the find
command, then try this convoluted replacement:
find test -type f | while read file; do
printf '%s\0%s\0%s\n' "${file%/*}" "$(tr -dc / <<< "$file")" "$file"
done | sort -t '\0' | awk -F'\0' '{print $3}'
It does the same thing, with ${file%/*}
being used to get a file's directory name and the tr
command being used to count the number of slashes, which is equivalent to a file's "depth".
(I sure hope there's an easier answer out there. What you're asking doesn't seem that hard, but I am blanking on a simple solution.)