shell scripting problem

[gfunk123]

I have n files that are generated by a system and they will be named 'file1 file 2 file3 file4' etc. I need to concatenate these files into one file called result. The problem is that i need the data in the file4 to be at the top and the data in file1 to be at the bottom etc. (ps file4 will not always be the highest file , it could go all the way to file999)

I tried doing this

ls file* | sort -r | cat > result

but this just gives me a file with a list of the file names and not the concatenated data.

Somebody mentioned that I might need to use xargs at some point but was unable to tell me how

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated

 

[pcunix]

ls file* | sort -r | xargs cat > wherever

is ONE way to do that.

If there are too many, you may need to do something like

ls | xargs grep "^file?" | sort -r | xargs cat > wherever

Probably a simpler way to do that but I'm in a rush

Tony Lawrence
SCO Unix/Linux Resources

http://pcunix.com

tony@pcunix.com