List all files (with full paths) in a directory (and subdirectories), order by access time

linux bash find ls
Andrew picture Andrew · Mar 8, 2012 · Viewed 67.4k times · Source

I'd like to construct a Linux command to list all files (with their full paths) within a specific directory (and subdirectories) ordered by access time.

ls can order by access time, but doesn't give the full path. find gives the full path, but the only control you have over the access time is to specify a range with -atime N (accessed at least 24*N hours ago), which isn't what I want.

Is there a way to order by access time and get the full path at once? I could just write a script, but it seems there should be a way to do this with the standard Linux programs.

Answer

Alex picture Alex · Mar 8, 2012 
find . -type f -exec ls -l {} \; 2> /dev/null | sort -t' ' -k +6,6 -k +7,7

This will find all files, and sort them by date and then time. You can then use awk or cut to extract the dates and files name from the ls -l output

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