Issue
I'm trying to find the smallest file by character length inside of a directory and, once it is found, I want to rename it and copy it to another directory.
For example, I have two files in one directory ~/Files and these are cars.txt and rabbits.txt
Text in cars.txt:
I like red cars that are big.
Text in rabbits.txt:
I like rabbits.
So far I know how to get the character length of a single file with the command wc -m 'filename' but I don't know how to do it in all the files and sort them in order. I know rabbits.txt is smaller in character length, but how do I compare both of them?
Solution
You could sort the files by size, then select the name of the first one:
file=$(wc -m ~/Files/* 2>/dev/null | sort -n | head -n 1 | awk '{print $2}')
echo $file
Answered By - Eric Marchand
