Linux – How to sort results of Find statement by date

The usual sort command doesn't provide an included way to specify your specific "dictionary", and while the grep command allows you to provide a file of regular expressions, it won't change the order of the output. But you can put both together in a simple foreach loop -- here's an example that works in the bash shell:

for i in `cat fileofregexp`; do grep "$i" myinputfile; done

This takes each regexp line from your file of regular expressions one by one, and outputs any match from your inputfile, so the resulting output will be sorted by your regexp order. Note that any lines in your inputfile that don't match at all will not make it to the output.

Addendum: As requested, here's a version using a while loop:

while IFS= read -r i; do grep "$i" myinputfile; done  < fileofregexp

A general method to sort by an arbitrary function of the contents of the line is as follows:

1. Get the key you want to sort by, and copy it to the beginning of the line
2. Sort
3. Delete the key from the beginning of the line

Here is a key you can use in this particular case: this sed program will output the the line from the last identifier to the end.

% sed -e 's/^.*[^[:alnum:]_]\([[:alpha:]][[:alnum:]_]*\)/\1/' < decls

albumArtView; // 1
profileView;  // 2
postFB;          // 3
saveButton;      // 4

To put these keys and the original lines side by side:

% paste <(sed -e 's/^.*[^[:alnum:]_]\([[:alpha:]][[:alnum:]_]*\)/\1/' < decls) decls

To sort them ...

| sort

and to leave just the second field (the original line)

| cut -f 2-

All together (sorting in reverse order, so there's something to show):

% paste <(sed -e 's/^.*[^[:alnum:]_]\([[:alpha:]][[:alnum:]_]*\)/\1/' < decls) decls \
  | sort -r \
  | cut -f 2-

→

@property (nonatomic, assign) UIButton *saveButton;      // 4
@property (nonatomic, strong, readonly) UIImageView *profileView;  // 2
@property (nonatomic, strong, readwrite) UIButton *postFB;          // 3
@property (nonatomic, strong) id <AlbumArtDelegate, UITextFieldDelegate> *albumArtView; // 1