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Erik N
Asked: 2018-10-23 07:11:56 +0800 CST

Is there a way to provide customized sorting rules to "ls" command?

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I work in material science so many of my directories are named by chemical element or equation. As such, ls and ls -v list my directories out of chemical order. I know I could rename my directories so they start with the atomic number of the element, but I don't want to do that. I was wondering if there was a simple way I could provide customized rules to ls such that it would list the directories according to the atomic number of the element instead of alphabetic or numeric order. If there was an alternative to ls that would be acceptable too.

customization ls file-sorting

1 Answers

  1. Make some test dirs:

    cd /tmp
for atom in H He Li Be B C N O F Ne Na;do mkdir $atom-directory;done

    The atomic number for each symbol:

    export ATOMS="H 1 He 2 Li 3 Be 4 B 5 C 6 N 7 O 8 F 9 Ne 10 Na 11" #and so on...

    Make a bash function, make sure everything is on one line:

    atomls () { for f in $(perl -le'%m=split" ",$ENV{ATOMS};$re=join"|",keys%m;print for map$$_[0],sort{$m{$$a[1]}<=>$m{$$b[1]}}map[$_,/($re)\b/],@ARGV' $*);do ls -ld $f; done }

    Run it:

    atomls *

    Result:

    drwxrwxr-x 2 idiot idiot 4096 okt.  22 19:56 H-directory
drwxrwxr-x 2 idiot idiot 4096 okt.  22 19:56 He-directory
drwxrwxr-x 2 idiot idiot 4096 okt.  22 19:56 Li-directory
drwxrwxr-x 2 idiot idiot 4096 okt.  22 19:56 Be-directory
drwxrwxr-x 2 idiot idiot 4096 okt.  22 19:56 B-directory
drwxrwxr-x 2 idiot idiot 4096 okt.  22 19:56 C-directory
drwxrwxr-x 2 idiot idiot 4096 okt.  22 19:56 N-directory
drwxrwxr-x 2 idiot idiot 4096 okt.  22 19:56 O-directory
drwxrwxr-x 2 idiot idiot 4096 okt.  22 19:56 F-directory
drwxrwxr-x 2 idiot idiot 4096 okt.  22 19:56 Ne-directory
drwxrwxr-x 2 idiot idiot 4096 okt.  22 19:56 Na-directory

    List just the two letter atoms:

    atomls ??-dir*
drwxrwxr-x 2 idiot idiot 4096 okt.  22 19:56 He-directory
drwxrwxr-x 2 idiot idiot 4096 okt.  22 19:56 Li-directory
drwxrwxr-x 2 idiot idiot 4096 okt.  22 19:56 Be-directory
drwxrwxr-x 2 idiot idiot 4096 okt.  22 19:56 Ne-directory
drwxrwxr-x 2 idiot idiot 4096 okt.  22 19:56 Na-directory

    There might be better ways...

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