ordering in bash "for" loop

Question

Is there any way to control the sorting that occurs when I run a, for i in * ; do; echo $i; done; in my directory. It seems to always use ascii sorting. Anyway to do a numeric sort?

Thanks, Vivek

Answer 1

How about making your filenames so they sort naturally as numbers, i.e. padded with leading zeros. Instead of 1 .. 10 .. 100, use 001 ..010 .. 100?

To include sub-directories:

for i in $( ls -d * | sort -n ); do echo $i; done;

To exclude sub-directories:

for i in $( ls | sort -n ); do echo $i; done;

I hope this helps.

Answer 2

You can always use sort(1) and its numeric sort:

for i in $(ls -1 * | sort -n) ; do echo $i ; done