I want to list a bunch of files that are sorted by their names excluding the file extension. I have these files in a directory

$ls
mobility_arXiv.tex
mobility_SR.bbl
paper-hj-mm.tex
paper-hj-mm-vp-rkp.tex
paper-hj.tex

I want the output to be

mobility_arXiv.tex
mobility_SR.bbl
paper-hj.tex
paper-hj-mm.tex
paper-hj-mm-vp-rkp.tex

Is there a way to achieve this.

5

2 Answers

You can pipe the output of ls into cut, which cuts fields, specifying "." as the delimiter. The result can then be sorted by piping into sort.

ls | cut -f 1 -d '.' | sort

If you need to handle dots "." in the filename you can use

ls | rev | cut -d . -f 2- | rev | sort

This works by first reversing each listing returned by ls, then cutting away the first (originally last) field, then reversing again.

NOTE: Cannot be used with colour output

If you wanted to keep the extension anyway, and just sort by the first part of the filename you can use

ls | sort -k 1,1 -t . 

Here you're telling sort to use "." as the delimiter and sort according to key(field) 1.

5

The ls command sorts files by filename alphabetically ascending by default. The extension is part of the filename so the best you can do, if you don't need the extension in the output is:

ls | cut -f 1 -d '.' | sort

UPDATE

A better solution:

ls | sort -k 1,1 -t .

Here sort is told to use just field number 1 and the dot as field separator. So it's ignoring the extension but not cutting it out.

2

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