mjhjmtu

I've wrote script that suppose to find all directories that contains number and dots or @tmp in their name, sort it by date and then save in variable 3rd result of statement. But this one is always giving me first result of query. How can I get proper result?

TL;DR I want to sort the matching directories by date and print the third directory name in that list

OLDDATA=`find . ( -name '*@tmp' -o -regex '.*/[0-9.]+' ) -exec ls -t + | awk "NR==3 print " `

Example of ls -t result

./1.2.3.4.5.6.102: ./1.2.3.4.5.6.101: ./1.2.3.4.5.6.100: ./1.2.3.4.5.6.99:
./1.2.3.4.5.6.98: ./1.2.3.4.5.6.97: ./1.2.3.4.5.6.96: ./1.2.3.4.5.6.95:
./1.2.3.4.5.6.94: ./1.2.3.4.5.6.93: ./1.2.3.4.5.6.92: ./1.2.3.4.5.6.91:
./1.2.3.4.5.6.90: ./1.2.3.4.5.6.89: ./1.2.3.4.5.6.88: ./1.2.3.4.5.6.87:

The correct statement in your particular case should look as below:

find . ( -name '*@tmp' -o -regex '.*/[0-9.]+' ) -exec ls -t ; | awk 'NR==3'

I would probably go for this approach (split over several lines for readability; just join them together to get a single line):

ls -td $(
 find . -maxdepth 1 -type d ( -name '@tmp' -o -regex '.*/[0-9.]+' )
) |
 sed -n '3p;q'

This finds the matching directory names, lists them in date order, and prints just the third entry from that list. (Using ls to sort the output from find is acceptable in this instance because we can be assured none of the path names contains whitespace or any other awkward character. In the general case this is a bad assumption.)

It won't match any of your directories that end with a colon (:) though (but nor would your original RE from your question).

I thought it might be useful to explain why your original statement wasn't achieving (what I think is) your stated aim.

Let's look at the find:

find . ( -name '*@tmp' -o -regex '.*/[0-9.]+' ) -exec ls -t +

This matches files or directories whose names either end with @tmp or are comprised only of the digits 0..9 or a dot .. When a file or directory matching these two patterns is found, it's added to a list. The list does not necessarily contain all of your matches and you should not assume it does. When the list is "long enough" it is passed to ls -t. You may get two or more executions of ls -t, each of which sorts and lists a different set of file and directory names.

On my systems, ls -t lists files first, in descending order by date modified. It them sorts the directory names in descending order by date modified, and for each one it prints the name and its contents (also sorted by descending date order). To omit the contents you would need to use ls -td.

To be safe, you cannot even use find ... -type d ... -exec ls -dt +, because you cannot know how many directory names will be passed to the list represented by .

Let's look at the awk:

awk "NR==3 print "

This is fine, although I would have tended to use print; exit to stop processing immediately the third item had been printed.