Terminal: SORT command; how to sort correctly?

user_11843698 0
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I have written a shell script that gets all the file names from a folder, and all its sub-folders, and copies them to the clipboard after sorting (removing all paths; I just need a simple file list of the thousands of randomly named files within).

What I can’t figure out is how to get the SORT command to sort properly. Meaning, the way a spreadsheet would sort things. Or the way your Mac finder sorts things.

Underscores > numbers > letters (regardless of case)

Anyone know how to do this? Sort -n only works for files starting with numbers, sort -f was close but separated the lower case and capitals in a weird way, and anything starting with a number was all over the place. Sort -V was the closest, but anything started with an underscore went to the bottom instead of the top… I’m about to lose my mind.

I’ve been trying to figure this out for a week, and no combination of anything I have tried gets the sort command to actually, ya know, sort properly.

Help?

automator shell terminal sorting bash
2 Answers

If I understand the problem correctly, you want the "natural sort order" as described in Natural sort order - Wikipedia, Sorting for Humans : Natural Sort Order, and macos - How does finder sort folders when they contain digits and characters?.

Using Linux sort(1) you need the -V (--version-sort) option for "natural" sort. You also need the -f (--ignore-case) option to disregard the case of letters. So, assuming that the file names are stored one-per-line in a file called files.txt you can produce a list (mostly) sorted in the way that you want with:

sort -Vf files.txt

However, sort -Vf sorts underscores after digits and letters on my system. I've tried using different locales (see How to set locale in the current terminal's session?), but with no success. I can't see a way to change this with sort options (but I may be missing something).

The characters . and ~ seem to consistently sort before numbers and letters with sort -V. A possible hack to work around the problem is to swap underscore with one of them, sort, and then swap again. For example:

tr '_~' '~_' <files.txt | LC_ALL=C sort -Vf |  tr '_~' '~_'

seems to do what you want on my system. I've explicitly set the locale for the sort command with LC_ALL=C ... so it should behave the same on other systems. (See Why doesn't sort sort the same on every machine?.)

user_41543750

It appears you want to sort in dictionary order and fold case, so it would be sort -df.

user_24132010
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