Bash Wildcards – How to Change Order of a Glob

bashwildcards

I am trying to show all instances of a particular message from the syslog in chronological order by doing something like the following:

grep squiggle /var/log/messages*

Unfortunately the glob pattern matches the currently active file first. eg.

/var/log/messages
/var/log/messages-20120220
/var/log/messages-20120227
/var/log/messages-20120305
/var/log/messages-20120312

This means that recent messages show up first followed by the historical messages in chronological order.

Is it possible to adjust the glob pattern behaviour somehow to make the empty match (ie. just messages) show up at the end of the list?

If not, what would be a good way to address this problem?

Best Answer

I don't know of a way to change the globbing order, but there's an easy workaround for your case:

grep squiggle /var/log/messages-* /var/log/messages

i.e. don't match the messages files in your glob pattern, and add it to the end of grep's argument list.

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