Sort the files by size retrieved from a series of folders

Question

I retrieved all the pdfs in $HOME directory

$ find -E ~ -regex ".*/[^/].*.pdf"

It print more than 1000 files;
I intent to sort them by size and searched

$ stat -f '%z' draft.sh
184

I drafts the script:

#! /usr/local/bin/bash

OLD_IFS=IFS 
IFS=$'\n'

touch sorted_pdf.md

for file in $(find -E ~ -regex ".*/[^/].*.pdf")
do
    file_size=$(stat -c "%s" $file)
    ....

done > sorted_pdf.md

IFS=OLD_IFS

It's hard to work them together and get my result. Could you please provide any hint?

I refactored the code

#! /bin/zsh
OLD_IFS=IFS 
IFS=$'\n'

touch sorted_pdf.md

for file in $(find -E ~ -regex ".*/[^/].*.pdf")
do
    # file_size=$(stat -c "%s" $file)
    printf '%s\n' $file(DoL)

done > sorted_pdf.md

IFS=OLD_IFS

but get error report

$ ./sort_files.sh

./sort_files.sh: line 12: syntax error near unexpected token `('
./sort_files.sh: line 12: `    printf '%s\n' $file(DoL)'

Answer 1

To sort by size, you can use zsh's glob qualifiers (zsh is installed by default on macOS, it even used to be sh there):

#! /bin/zsh -
printf '%s\n' **/*.pdf(DoL)

• **/ is recurse globbing
• (DoL) is a glob qualifier, D to include dot files (hidden files) as find would, oL to sort the generated list by file Length.

Note that -regex ".*/[^/].*.pdf doesn't make much sense.

That matches for instance on /home/foo/pdf , .* on /home, then /, then [^/] on f then .* on oo, then . on / and then pdf.

With -regex, with or without -E, you can use -regex '.*\.pdf' to match on *.pdf files, but you might as well use the standard -name '*.pdf'.

You could use:

find . -name '*.pdf' -exec stat -f '%z %N' {} + |
  sort -n |
  cut -d ' ' -f 2-

But that wouldn't work if there were file paths with newline characters.

With GNU utilities, you could do:

find . -name '*.pdf' -printf '%s %p\0' |
  sort -nz |
  cut -zd ' ' -f 2- |
  tr '\0' '\n'

Note that if any of those pdf files are symlinks, it's the size of the symlink that is considered, not the size of the target of the symlink. To sort on the size of that target, change DoL to D-oL or add the -L options to stat. And with GNU find:

find -L . \( ! -xtype l -o -prune \) -name '*.pdf' -printf '%s %p\0' |
  sort -nz |
  cut -zd ' ' -f 2- |
  tr '\0' '\n'

For case-insensitive matching, either replace pdf with [pP][dD][fF] or replace -name with -iname (not standard but supported by GNU and BSD find), or for zsh, enabled the extendedglob option and change pdf to (#i)pdf or enable the nocaseglob option.

Answer 2

If you have access to GNU find, awk:

$ find $HOME -iname "*.pdf" -printf '%s\0%p\n' | sort -h -t '\0' | awk -F '\0' '{print $2}'

This command:

• finds all files in $HOME having (case insensitive) pdf extension and prints size and path for each one;
• sorts the list by the first field using the -h option that enables human readable number comparison;
• prints the sorted paths.