As an auxiliary question, it'd be nice to know how to make the output look neat as well (does bash have some form of string formatting?) Anyways, I have a find . command returning all files over a certain size, and I want to sort those results in descending order and pipe them to a mailer. I have the mailing part down, but I'm not sure how to sort them and display the file sizes in an organized manner. Thank you for the help!
This will find all files > 1000 bytes and print out the filename and size (in bytes):
$ find tmp/ -size +1000c -printf '%p %s\n' | sort -k2 -n
Which would give you output like:
tmp/gitwork/integration/.git/hooks/pre-rebase.sample 4951
tmp/gitwork/repo1/.git/hooks/pre-rebase.sample 4951
tmp/gitwork/repo2/.git/hooks/pre-rebase.sample 4951
tmp/gitwork/upstream1/hooks/pre-rebase.sample 4951
tmp/gitwork/upstream2/hooks/pre-rebase.sample 4951
tmp/constraints.dot 7035
tmp/constraints.svg 41657
tmp/so31567373/KBFI.xml 375557
tmp/overflow.tar 399360
If you want to make this "pretty", you could add some field-width specifiers to that printf directive:
$ find tmp/ -size +1000c -printf '%-60p %s\n' | sort -k2 -n
Which would get you:
tmp/gitwork/integration/.git/hooks/pre-rebase.sample 4951
tmp/gitwork/repo1/.git/hooks/pre-rebase.sample 4951
tmp/gitwork/repo2/.git/hooks/pre-rebase.sample 4951
tmp/gitwork/upstream1/hooks/pre-rebase.sample 4951
tmp/gitwork/upstream2/hooks/pre-rebase.sample 4951
tmp/constraints.dot 7035
tmp/constraints.svg 41657
tmp/so31567373/KBFI.xml 375557
tmp/overflow.tar 399360
If your definition of "pretty" requires something more complex, you may want to investigate piping the output through awk.