OSX 10.9.4
How do I sort, or separate files in any way, distinguishing them by filetype?
I mean, separate them by using the last bit of the filename that begins with the dot?
This used to work.
MacBook Pro (17-inch Late 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9.4)
The nearest way is to sort by kind. If you view the folder in list view which is available via the View menu, and then find the Kind column and click on it, it will sort by Kind.
This seems to work for me in Mavericks, I just did a quick test of a folder containing two .epub files, a folder, and two .mobi files the results were like this
file.epub
file2.epub
untitled folder
file.mobi
file2.mobi
When the same was sorted by filename it looks like
file.epub
file.mobi
file2.epub
file2.mobi
untitled folder
Odd, yourmethod doesn't work for me, with more than two of each type.
Try a few dozen files with various first letters in the filename and a mix of .mobi, .azw, .azw3, and .epub and see what you get, with a variety of filenames.
All of them have the "Kind" ebook, and clicking that colum just reverses the alpha sort order by first letter of the filename.
Has anyone familiar with UNIX got a suggestion of a way to do this?
-- sort by the file extension -- the dot and the characters after the dot
This ought to be doable at least from the Terminal?
ps, I can brute force this by doing a file/find search for the extension and moving each resulting batch to a separate folder.
But that's tiresome compared to the old way using the extension.
I tested this in Mavericks 10.9.4 but I suspect the big difference is what applications you have installed that have registered themselves as capable of opening these files. I as an example have an applications that can open ePub files installed (Pages) but not Mobi files.
With regards to using Unix, the standard ls (list) command would list them in name order not kind order. The ls command does have support for listing in date (i.e. time) order, or size order, but not as far as I can see file extension or kind order.
ls = name order
ls -t = last modified order
ls -U = creation date order
ls -u = last accessed order
ls -S = size order
Ok, as ls by itself will not do the job on Mac (apparently the linux version has an extra option that would which is ls -X) we need to use multiple Unix commands added together to do this.
ls | rev | sort | rev
This 'lists' the file names, pipes it to rev which reverse the order of the characters which means the file extension is now at the beginning, sorts it, then reverse the order again. It may not be perfect as epub gets reversed to bupe and this may result in unexpected sorting, but at least each file extension is grouped together.
Here is my list result, first the default name order
file.epub
file.mobi
file2.epub
file2.mobi
untitled folder
now sorted by 'extension'
file2.epub
file.epub
file2.mobi
file3.mobi
file.mobi
untitled folder
Clearly this approach could be extended further to perhaps improve it more.
Try sorting by Kind.
finder sort by extension? (.epub and .mobi are mixed)
