Re: cp alphabetical

[Andrés Ghigliazza]

Bob,

Thanks very much for your answer.

I use wildcards for copying alphabetical, but it would be much more
easy to copying alphabetical with -r option. I mean, I have
directories like "artist/album"; with wildcards, I can copy
alphabetical all the songs, but I have to create all the directories
before (or use a script to do that). If there was an option for
copying alphabetical, I could copy all the albums of an artist, or
various artist with one command. For example, "cp -r -alphabetical
artist1 /media/disk", would copy all the albums from artist1 at once,
alphabetically.

I know that many music players play the songs in the order of their
names, but I don't have problem with that, because my files have the
track number at the beggining of their name.

Thanks,

tizo


On 6/19/07, Bob Proulx <address@hidden> wrote:
> Andrés Ghigliazza wrote:
> > It would be useful to me, that cp has an option to copy files
> > alphabetical.
>
> By default cp used with shell wildcards will already copy files
> alphabetically due to the shell's sorting of file globs when they are
> expanded.
>
> Example:
>
>   mkdir test
>   cd test
>   touch aaa zzz bbb
>   echo cp * /tmp/
>   cp aaa bbb zzz /tmp/
>
> The files presented to cp by the shell's file glob are sorted.
> Is this not what you are seeing?  If not could you debug why not?
>
> This is a feature of the shell and is influenced by the 'locale'
> setting when you started the shell.  The locale setting defines the
> character collation sequence sort order.
>
> > The reason is, that there are some portable music players that, play
> > the songs in the order that were copied to its flash memory.
>
> Interesting.  Most music players that I have encountered play them in
> the order of sorted filenames.  Therefore a common need is to rename
> the files into "playlist" order with a leading sort-forcing string.
>
> Bob