Hi all.

How is possible to apply a sorting to the output of an "ls" command?

I need to sort by biggest dimension and smallest dimension.

There are many ways to do a sort so it might help if you gave a specific example so we can help with a specific solution.

Otherwise you might want to try the following:

ls -l | sort -k 'n'

eg.

ls -l | sort 5

would sort by the file size

Let us know if that helps.

CK

We used "tail" and "head" command to display only the biggest "n" files or the smallest; the head works fine, the tail no.

Would it be possible for you to supply an example of what you are typing?

Cheers

CK

ls - l --sort=size | head -n 5

ls - l --sort=size | tail -n 5

right...

I've tried this and it worked for me, so.... for you:

- when you say it didn't work, what error or output do you get?
- does it fail for any ls or just some directories?
- to find out if there is a general problem with 'tail', you could cat a test file through "tail -n 5" and see if that works
- if tail does not work, try sed

eg.

ls -l sort=size | sed -n '3,$p'
ls -l sort=size | sed -n '45,51p'

tip: if you want to know last five lines they quickly pipe through "wc -l" to find out how many lines in output and then set the sed command as appropriate. Sorry this is messy but I am not sed expert and that is what i would do, no doubt sed experts out there will tell us how to use sed to get last x lines?



CK

Ok probably I expalined badly the problem.

I'm making a script that works on folder and directories and shows them with some sorting criteria; now the point is: I have 2 options: see files with biggest dimension or see files with smallest dimension. So how it works: simple: I always use "ls -l --sort=size" but one time I use "| head -n 10" and the other one "| tail -n 10".

When I use the "tail" command it doesn't display the right files...but again the biggest...

Ok - in that case, so we know if it's a problem with the shell, the tail command or your script. Does that "tailing" work if you do it from the command line prompt?

I would guess that it's more likely that you have an error with your script than a problem with the tail command, but without seeing your script, it's hard to say. Let us know if the tail works as it should from plain command line....


good luck

CK