Sorting and extracting of dirnames

Question

There are a lot of directories named like

web001
web002
...
web123
...

I want to extract a max-number from this set...
Something like num="´find -name /dirname sort ... | tail´" with extracting. I have no ideas...

Thank you

Answer 1

ls | sort | tail -n 1

Will tell you what the last folder sorted alphabetically is

Answer 2

You can use tr -dc [0-9] to get rid of all non-numbers. Note that this also gets rid of the newline but if you extract just a single line with tail, that does not matter.

Answer 3

If you want just the number:

find -type d -name web\* | sort | tail -n 1 | cut -d'b' -f2