On Thursday, May 19th 2005 at 17:57 +0200, quoth roland brouwers: => =>roland brouwers wrote: =>> Hello everybody, =>> =>> Could someone tell me how I can =>> List all filenames in a directory, sorted by time =>> And then =>> Copying each file in this order to one file line by line, each line =>> preceded by the first character of the filename Just do it all in bash ls -rt | while read line do while read file do echo "${line:0:1} $file" done < $line done Take the space out of the echo if you don't like it. -- Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana. Stranger things have .0. happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ ..0 Donor?Black holes are where God divided by zero. Listen to me! We are all- 000 individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question? steveo at syslang.net