Is there any way to order the "show tables" command, or equivalent way of returning table info.

I have a shell script that creates a new log table weekly, and copies data into the table created from a live data table.

problem is, I've used the "show tables" command to find out what the existing table numbering is, and to give me a CSV list to alter the merge engine table that looks at these archive tables.

the table list from "show tables" comes out as...

log_1
log_10
log_2
log_3
log_4
log_5
log_6
log_7
log_8
log_9

dumping this into a txt file, and then getting the last record is obviously wrong now, due to how it's ordered.

Is there any way to order the show tables using creation date or something?

regards

Andrew

problem solved.

renamed all the low number tables to

log_01
log_02 etc

solved the ordering problem

Which is a slightly better idea