On Mon, Aug 16, 2021 at 10:35:12PM -0400, Dale R. Worley wrote: > Back in the old, old days, there was a program named "glob" that did > pathname expansions. So you wouldn't say > > cat * > > you'd say > > cat $( glob * )
Tcl still does it that way. Not with that syntax, but the command name is "glob". (It doesn't sort them for you, though.) > where glob would get one argument, "*", and output a list of file > names. A glob-by-modification-date program would be a better solution > for this need, IMHO. Would this be a shell builtin, or a loadable bash builtin, or an external program? Honestly it just sounds like more buck-passing. There's a history of other projects refusing to provide this kind of functionality, even when it would have been super easy, and even when a patch was provided.[1] Trying to reintroduce an external glob(1) utility will go over like a lead balloon, I'm sure. Even if by some miracle you do manage to get one included in a single Linux distribution, it won't be universally available, which means it's pretty useless for shell scripting. [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2014-02/msg00005.html Right now, there are zero great ways to get a list of the files in a directory sorted by mtime. If you happen to be on a recent GNU coreutils system, you can use ls -t --quoting-style=shell-escape together with bash's eval. This isn't too far off from your glob(1) suggestion, but it only works on systems that have this particular version of ls(1), and only in bash. Otherwise, if you happen to have GNU find and GNU sort available, you can cobble something together with find -printf '%T@ %p\0' and sort -zn. It's clumsy and ugly, and it's still not portable, but it might be an available option on some systems that don't have a new enough GNU coreutils. Maybe. What else... well, you could write your own Bubble Sort algorithm in bash, using [[ $a -nt $b ]] to compare array entries and swap them. The good news is that this would be portable to any system with bash. The bad news: speed? What is speed? I guess you could live with it for a typical log directory where you only have like 30 files (one month's worth). It wouldn't be fun or elegant, though. The most common solution? "Redesign your whole application so that the filenames contain ASCII-sortable timestamps." An option to change the glob sorting order would actually be useful, not for a large number of scripts, but for a very specific problem domain where the shell is often used. Is it critically important? No. But it would be helpful.
