I can't believe I'm posting this :-p I'm nowhere near being a
unix/linux guru, and one would probably have a dozen complaints with
this if they saw it, but....
ls -l | grep -v total | cut -f 11 -d ' ' | sort -n | tail -1
Your milage may vary if ls -l displays something slightly different than
mine does, then try adjusting which field cut takes.
HTH,
Matt
Philip Hallstrom wrote:
Suppose I have a directory with a HUGE number of filenames, all of which
happen to look like integers:
~/nntp/1
~/nntp/2
~/nntp/3
.
.
.
~/nntp/59874
~/nntp/59875
~/nntp/59876
Now, in a PHP script, what's the most efficient way to find the "largest"
filename, where "largest" means in the sense of an integer, not a string?
I could probably force the filenames to be 0-padded if that would make a
significant difference.
Is there some nifty shell command I should just "exec"?...
I don't really care which shell, but I'm a bash user generally.
Obviously I could loop through all the filenames, so I'm looking for
something faster than that. :-)
I can't think of anything you could do in the shell that would be faster...
Anything you do in the shell is going to involve 'ls' which is going to
have to loop through all the filenames anyway... so you might as well do
it within PHP and save yourself the exec and other processes to
sort/trim the list.
I suppose you could try some sort of hunt and peck search... say you had
some idea how many files where in there (under say 10,000). Then you
could maybe do something like checking if 5000 exists. If it does,
check 7500. If it doesn't, check 6250. If it does, check 6875 and so
on until you're down to a reasonable "gap". Then just check
incrementally from there.
Whether or not that's going to be faster than just looping through them
all I don't know...
good luck!
-philip
--
Matt Blasinski (mbv)
Information Systems Technology Services Professional
Internet Infrastructure Applications Technology
Division of Information Technology
3228 Computer Science and Statistics
1210 West Dayton Street
Madison WI 53706
Work (608) 263-4865
Personal Cell (608) 347-6940
<?php
echo "You can have it fast, cheap, or working. Choose two.";
?>
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