[SOLVED] sorting files with abnormal date structure

qlue · 10-30-2015, 01:50 AM

Hi, I have a directory that contains about 200 files that need to be sorted into chronological order.

The problem is, all the files were retrieved on the same day, so I have to use the weird dates that are in the file names.
The files are 'dated' using the weird American convention of putting the month name first followed by the day and ending with the year.

Any suggestions on how to get them to list in chronological order? Or at least to bulk rename them with a sane, sortable, date?

pan64 · 10-30-2015, 01:56 AM

that is the command rename You can specify regexp and also reorder parts...

berndbausch · 10-30-2015, 02:45 AM

The sort command features sorting by month name (-M option) as well as setting up several sort keys (-k). Then there is the question how the sort fields are defined - by character position or by delimiters like white space and commas.

suicidaleggroll · 10-30-2015, 11:39 AM

The American system of MM/DD/YYYY is weird, but even the more "standard" system of DD/MM/YYYY wouldn't make it any easier to sort. The system to use for file navigation is YYYYMMDD, but nobody uses that in normal life (though anybody who's had to face this problem before definitely uses it in their file naming conventions!).

If it were me, I would just write a script to rip out the date from the filename and rename it to YYYYMMDD.

schneidz · 10-30-2015, 11:44 AM

i personally like:

Quote:

[schneidz@hyper ~]$ date +%Y-%j
2015-303

qlue · 10-30-2015, 01:06 PM

Thanks everyone for the responses.
However, it looks like I'm going to have to do some manual work as some of the files have different formats.
The only consistent part is that the months are written in words!

I'm marking this thread as 'solved' since there really is no practical solution other than to go through the list and renaming each file to a more sane result.