a working for loop

So I was sorting through my org-mode files and I found a little snippet of code that I had lying around. I’ve had a problem with shell scripting for a while. I use bash a lot, and I’ve written a few functions, and procedural scripts that I’ve found useful in my travels, but anything that requires “logic,” often escapes me in tragic and epic ways.

Here’s the problem. I had a directory of notes that I had compiled for presentation in an ikiwiki blog for notes. As I wanted these notes to be in my org-mode system, I needed to take a directory of 60 or so files, and turn them into a single org file. As an additional bonus, I needed the files to be organized by date rather than by the alphabet. Also, as ikiwiki generated page titles from the filename, I needed to capture that information in the org-mode file. Here’s what I came up with

for i in `ls -t`;  do
   echo -e "$i" >> ~/org/legacy_notes.org &&
   cat "$i" >> ~/org/legacy_notes.org ;
done

It works as a one liner, but it works. I think previous attempts have left out crucial semi-colons or the do and done statements. No clue. Baby steps folks.