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I have the need to allow a GUI user to select various ways to sort multi-line text output from a (SunOS based) 'ls -l' command (think auto-sort on excel).

Given the ls format as follows:

  2 drwxr-x---   2 myuser   mygroup    512 Jun 14 09:20 filename
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In my opinion, they may choose to sort on any field except file permissions (but then again...), here's a list from right-to-left (as I understand them) and how they should be sorted:

filename - alphabetic

timestamp - oldest to newest

#ofBytes - numeric

group - alphabetic

user - alphabetic

#ofLinks - numeric

filePermissions - ??

#ofBlocks - numeric

I have all the data in a list (it comes from a remote host, so I can't access the file information directly from perl).

My current plan is to create a sub that is called like this:

@sorted = fileSort($field, @data);
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This sub should be smart enough to do the right thing when sorting the various fields. I'm looking for advice on how to design it (or pointers to an existing sub that does this, or CPAN modules that may be helpful).

So far, my investigations initially led me to Sort::Fields which gives me a nice framework to do field sorting on a list of text, but would break down on the timestamp stuff (I could pre-process that to shoehorn it to work with this module).

Am I on the right track here, or is there something better I should be considering? I have some fears about the following:

timestamp - sorting this will be the biggest headache, I first need to collect all the correct "fields" that make up the timestamp, then need to change the variable ways that ls prints timestamps back into EPOCH time (using Date::Calc?) for numerical sorting, then put the initial text back in the final sorted list.

filename - Typical filename fears: what about goofy characters (spaces, non-ascii, etc).

group/user - Do I have the same problem here with goofy characters?

filepermissions - Ok, if I talk myself into allowing the user to sort on this, what way should it be sorted?

Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated!

Thanks

-Craig

In reply to Excel-like sort for multiple fields unix 'ls -l' output by cmv

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