Find files in current directory sorted by modified time and store result in an array

Question

Can somebody tell me what am I doing wrong in following shell function?

NOTES_PATH=\"/home/temp\"

function open_note {

    local files=()                               


        

Answer 1

The original code had several bugs:

• The advantages of NUL-delimiting content prior to xargs -0 were lost, because the output of ls -t was not NUL-delimited.
• Because xargs split results into multiple ls -t invocations, sorting took place only within these batches: Given enough filenames to require two or more invocations, those invocations would only be individually sorted, not globally sorted.
• Parsing output of ls is generally error-prone.

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A cleaner implementation (assuming GNU find and GNU sort) would look like the following:

open_note() {
  local filename mtime
  local -a files=( )

  while IFS= read -r -d' ' mtime && IFS= read -r -d '' filename; do
    files+=( "$filename" )
  done < <(find "$NOTES_PATH" -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf '%T@ %P\0' | sort -z -n)
}

The find action given emits a stream of the format:

<epoch time> <filename><NUL>

...which sort then sorts on, after which the while read loop discards the first part of each field.

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A few other notes:

• Don't use the function keyword; it makes your code gratuitously incompatible with POSIX sh, but (unlike other, more useful bashisms) adds no advantage whatsoever over the compliant syntax.
• If you're trying to keep your locals scoped, be sure that you get all of them -- that includes names being looped over.