How to recursively find the latest modified file in a directory?

bash filesystems find
JMW picture JMW · Dec 30, 2010 · Viewed 220.9k times · Source

It seems that ls doesn't sort the files correctly when doing a recursive call:

ls -altR . | head -n 3

How can I find the most recently modified file in a directory (including subdirectories)?

Answer

plundra picture plundra · Dec 30, 2010 
find . -type f -printf '%T@ %p\n' | sort -n | tail -1 | cut -f2- -d" "

For a huge tree, it might be hard for sort to keep everything in memory.

%T@ gives you the modification time like a unix timestamp, sort -n sorts numerically, tail -1 takes the last line (highest timestamp), cut -f2 -d" " cuts away the first field (the timestamp) from the output.

Edit: Just as -printf is probably GNU-only, ajreals usage of stat -c is too. Although it is possible to do the same on BSD, the options for formatting is different (-f "%m %N" it would seem)

And I missed the part of plural; if you want more then the latest file, just bump up the tail argument.

Related questions

What tool to use to draw file tree diagram

Given a file tree - a directory with directories in it etc, how would you write a script to create a diagram of the file-tree as a graphic file that I can embed in a word processor document. I prefer …

Read More
What is the Unix command to create a hardlink to a directory in OS X?

How do you create a hardlink (as opposed to a symlink or a Mac OS alias) in OS X that points to a directory? I already know the command "ln target destination" but that only works when the target is …

Read More
How to get file contents by inode in Bash?

How can I retrieve file contents in Bash by knowing only the inode of the file?

Read More