5

Ultimately, I wanted to set the latest version as an environment variable, so supplementing the selected answer (which provided me the correct sorting):

export LATEST_VERSION=$(printf '%s\n' * | sort -rV | head -1)

I have a directory with the following directory names:

ls -1r .
2.0
1.8
16.1
16.0
15.5
15.0
14.5
14.1
14.0
1.3
1.2
1.1.5
1.1.3
1.1.2

I would like to sort them to get the latest release version:

ls -1r . | head -1
16.1

So the underlying order should look like this:

16.1
16.0
15.5
15.0
14.5
14.1
14.0
2.0
1.8
1.3
1.2
1.1.5
1.1.3
1.1.2

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Simpler the better, but I'm open to any solution. Thanks!

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
15

Modern GNU sort offers a -V flag for sorting according to version number rules:

$ printf '%s\n' * | sort -rV
16.1
16.0
15.5
15.0
14.5
14.1
14.0
2.0
1.8
1.3
1.2
1.1.5
1.1.3
1.1.2

Note that the above does not use ls. As a general rule, you shouldn't parse the output of ls(1).

Documentation

From man sort:

-V, --version-sort
natural sort of (version) numbers within text

The above is from the GNU man page.

FreeBSD's sort also supports -V.

OSX

Apple's sort is a GNU sort from the year 2005 which predates support for the -V option. A work-around can be found here. (Hat tips: l'L'l, mklement0)

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6 Comments

In OS X it's actually a real pain in comparison; I asked a similar question a while back: solution here.
@l'L'l Very good. Answer updated with a link to that question.
@mklement0 Interesting. I usually expect Apple to use BSD tools where available but you are right: OSX sort is GNU. From the only Apple man page that I found online (10.9), it appears to date from 2005. I also found a man page for FreeBSD sort and it shows support for -V.
@John1024: Yes, it is curious that the odd - usually ancient - GNU utility comes with OS X. I don't know what guides those decisions and whether they're technology- or license-related. It is unfortunate that OS X apparently keeps up with neither the GNU nor the BSD world in terms of providing (reasonably) recent versions.
@mklement0 The explanation that I have heard was that Apple won't use GPL v3 software. I have no explanation for the failure to keep up with BSD releases.
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-1

FWIW, I'm in Mac OS right now, and haven't booted over to linux to test. But, it looks like sort with the numeric option has the smarts to do it:

But, I have a directory with your subdirectories in it, and ls sorts it badly:

/Users/thedave/tmp $ ls -1r
2.0
16.1.12
16.1
16.0
15.5
15.0
14.5
14.1
14.0
1.8
1.3
1.2
1.1.5
1.1.3
1.1.2
1.1
1.0.1
1.0

sort(1) accepts '-n' for numeric and '-r' for reverse:

/Users/thedave/tmp $ ls | sort -rn
16.1.12
16.1
16.0
15.5
15.0
14.5
14.1
14.0
2.0
1.8
1.3
1.2
1.1.5
1.1.3
1.1.2
1.1
1.0.1
1.0
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2 Comments

This will fail on OS X with numbers such as 1.13.1, 1.11.10, 14.15.10, etc.
Sorting version numbers is fundamentally different from numerical sorting: numerically, 1.9 is greater than 1.10, but in terms of version numbers, it is the opposite (leaving aside the fact that a floating-point interpretation of a version string breaks down fundamentally with 3 or more version components). No sort implementation will ever sort version numbers correctly with an option geared towards numerical sorting.

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