Today I had to import about ~150 file entries into an XML file. Being a good lazy geek, I could not resign myself to copy/paste this over. With the help of Rake and some custom-tailored scripts, I made it through in no time :)

All these files had the same format:

1
2
3
4
5

chapter1_slide1_fr.png
chapter1_slide2_fr.png
...
chapter1_slide19_fr.png
chapter2_slide1_fr.png

Of course, when I tried to sort them with the sort command, it did not really work as expected… Because this is a lexicographical sort, and not the natural sort we would expect.

1
2

chapter1_slide19_fr.png
chapter1_slide1_fr.png

I needed a natural sort, just like the natsort() function from PHP. Actually, I also needed a small program that would list the contents of a directory and print its naturally-sorted contents.

These scripts are available on my github. You can easily install them for your user by running the shutil_install.sh script. You may have to chmod +x the scripts however. Read more on these scripts on their dedicated page.

Hope you’ll find this useful, feel free to contribute your own scripts (via pull requests, for example :)