How to recursively find and list the latest modified files in a directory with subdirectories and times?

linux recursion time filesystems
fredrik picture fredrik · Apr 6, 2011 · Viewed 438.7k times · Source

  • Operating system: Linux

  • Filesystem type: ext3

  • Preferred solution: bash (script/oneliner), ruby, python

I have several directories with several subdirectories and files in them. I need to make a list of all these directories that is constructed in a way such that every first-level directory is listed next to the date and time of the latest created/modified file within it.

To clarify, if I touch a file or modify its contents a few subdirectory levels down, that timestamp should be displayed next to the first-level directory name. Say I have a directory structured like this:

./alfa/beta/gamma/example.txt

and I modify the contents of the file example.txt, I need that time displayed next to the first-level directory alfa in human readable form, not epoch. I've tried some things using find, xargs, sort and the likes but I can't get around the problem that the filesystem timestamp of 'alfa' doesn't change when I create/modify files a few levels down.

Answer

Heppo picture Heppo · Sep 16, 2011

Try this one:

#!/bin/bash
find $1 -type f -exec stat --format '%Y :%y %n' "{}" \; | sort -nr | cut -d: -f2- | head

Execute it with the path to the directory where it should start scanning recursively (it supports filenames with spaces).

If there are lots of files it may take a while before it returns anything. Performance can be improved if we use xargs instead:

#!/bin/bash
find $1 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 stat --format '%Y :%y %n' | sort -nr | cut -d: -f2- | head

which is a bit faster.

Related questions

Recursively look for files with a specific extension

I'm trying to find all files with a specific extension in a directory and its subdirectories with my bash (Latest Ubuntu LTS Release). This is what's written in a script file: #!/bin/bash directory="/home/flip/Desktop" suffix="in" browsefolders () …

Read More
List files recursively in Linux CLI with path relative to the current directory

This is similar to this question, but I want to include the path relative to the current directory in unix. If I do the following: ls -LR | grep .txt It doesn't include the full paths. For example, I have the …

Read More
How to recursively list directories in C on Linux?

I need to recursively list all directories and files in C programming. I have looked into FTW but that is not included with the 2 operating systems that I am using (Fedora and Minix). I am starting to get a big …

Read More