Apple

On Feb 08, 2012, at 03:54, Nigel Garvey wrote:

Back in the days before 'sort' disappeared with the introduction of Mac OS X, it would take a Finder reference as its direct parameter. When it was reintroduced (with Tiger, I think), it only accepted lists, so references had to be realised first.

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Hey Nigel,

Thanks. That rings true, although my memory is admittedly foggy.

Using the Finder to do the sort is rather grossly slow - 3 full seconds to sort 55 items on my i7 MacBook Pro with Lion.

By contrast this will run in ~ 0.05 seconds on the same folder:

on listFolderByModDate(folderAlias)

set posixFolder to POSIX path of folderAlias

set posixFolderQuoted to quoted form of posixFolder

set itemList to (do shell script "ls -tr " & posixFolderQuoted)

set itemList to paragraphs of itemList

return itemList

end listFolderByModDate

on makeAliasList(folderAlias, fileNameList)

set folderAlias to folderAlias as text

repeat with i in fileNameList

set contents of i to (folderAlias & contents of i)

end repeat

return fileNameList

end makeAliasList

set folderAlias to alias "Thor:Users:chris:Pictures:Downloads (New):"

set sortedFileNameList to listFolderByModDate(folderAlias)

makeAliasList(folderAlias, sortedFileNameList)

I *think* it will work back to Tiger for a mod-date sort and perhaps further.

Best Regards,

Chris

References:
	>Re: Sort error in Leopard (From: Nigel Garvey <email@hidden>)