Yrurtj

My main objective is to copy the contents of a directory and send it to a file. Then cut out the directory location to just have the name. Then to organize it's contents but most appeared. This is also homework and my restrictions are it has to be one command

This is what I thought would do the job but it doesn't

wc -l ~location/folder/folder/*.log > ~/log.info | cut -d "/" -f9 ~/log.info | sort

My output

1 /s/s/s/s/location/folder/folder/a.log

1 /s/s/s/s/location/folder/folder/b.log

1 /s/s/s/s/location/folder/folder/c.log

3 /s/s/s/s/location/folder/folder/d.log

2 /s/s/s/s/location/folder/folder/e.log

What I want it to be

1 a

1 b

1 c

2 e

3 d

You can strip out all of the bits you don't want by piping the output through sed:

wc -l ~location/folder/folder/*.log > ~/log.info

cut -d "/" -f9 ~/log.info | sort | sed 's_/.*/__;s_.log$__'

How about:

perl -e 'print sort map {s/(d).*(w)..*//r} <>' 

(Needs perl 5.14+ - this is probably installed on your system already)

Uses an inlined bit of perl code that:

• reads <> which is STDIN or files specified on command line.


• Uses a substitution regex which captures a digit (d) and a letter just before a . (w).


• then returns the transformed string. r regex flag.


• uses map to iterate STDIN.


• and sort to ... well, sort.


• and print to print it.

Output:

1 a

1 b

1 c

2 e

3 d

Alternatively:

perl -e '%x=map {open($f,'<',$_); @f=<$f>; $_=>''.@f} @ARGV;print "$x{$_} $_n" for sort {$x{$a}<=>$x{$b}} keys %x;' ~location/folder/folder/*.log 

wc … > ~/log.info | cut ~/log.info | …

The two sides of the pipe are executed in parallel. Unless wc is especially quick to finish and cut is especially slow to start, by the time cut reads ~/log.info, it's likely to be still empty, or even nonexistent. To compound the problem, the redirection on sort is also executed in parallel and also truncates the file.

I don't understand what you're trying to do with this intermediate temporary file. It isn't useful:

wc -l ~location/folder/folder/*.log | cut -d "/" -f9 | sort > ~/log.info

It would be simpler to switch to the target directory:

{ cd ~location/folder/folder && wc -l -- *.log; } | sort > ~/log.info