Is there a way to provide a sort order to an mdfind query?

Question

In trying to get a list of all music files from a particular album using mdfind I see that the files aren't necessarily returned in any order. I'd prefer album/track order if possible, but can't find a way to provide the sort order on the command line. The current invocation is something like:

mdfind -onlyin "$MUSICROOT" -literal "$MDQUERY"

where:

$MUSICROOT is ~/Music/iTunes
$MDQUERY is "kMDItemContentTypeTree == 'public.audio' && kMDItemAlbum == '*$1*'c"

Ideally I'd want to add something like the following to the query:

ORDER BY kMDItemAlbum, kMDItemAudioTrackNumber

Answer 1

At the risk of stating the obvious, 'sort'.

e.g. mdfind -onlyin "$MUSICROOT" -literal "$MDQUERY" | sort

will sort the output alphabetically, giving you Artist, Title, Track. (it won't do the cool iTunes trick of ignoring 'The').

The sort command has lots of options, including sorting on particular fields if you want more control.

Edit: The below shell script function will provide the desired sort in the specific case mentioned:

function sort_file()
{
    TMPFILE=`mktemp /tmp/sortable.XXXXXX` || exit 1
    export MDLS="mdls -raw -name kMDItemAlbum -name kMDItemAudioTrackNumber"
    export TR="tr \"\0\" \"\;\""
    awk '{system( "$MDLS \"" $0 "\" | $TR" ); print "\;"$0; }' $1 > $TMPFILE
    sort -t\; -k 2n -k 1f $TMPFILE | awk -F";" '{ print $3; }' > $1
}

Answer 2

I used the following shell function to provide the sort:

function sort_file()
{
    TMPFILE=`mktemp /tmp/sortable.XXXXXX` || exit 1
    export MDLS="mdls -raw -name kMDItemAlbum -name kMDItemAudioTrackNumber"
    export TR="tr \"\0\" \"\;\""
    awk '{system( "$MDLS \"" $0 "\" | $TR" ); print "\;"$0; }' $1 > $TMPFILE
    sort -t\; -k 2n -k 1f $TMPFILE | awk -F";" '{ print $3; }' > $1
}

META NOTE: I would have put this in a comment in the above answer, but couldn't get it to format correctly.