topic Re: Find the most recent file in Operating System - Linux

Find the most recent file

Leo The Cat — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:44:04 GMT

Hello

How to find the most recent files (Created or modified) under a specified directory and recursively in sub dirs ?

any Idea ?

Thank you very much
Den

Re: Find the most recent file

smatador — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:03:29 GMT

Hi,
You could do for example
find /directory -ctime 1 -o -mtime 1 -depth -type f | xargs ls -al

Re: Find the most recent file

Leo The Cat — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:08:45 GMT

Hi

It's not enough because if no activities from more days ...

I need something more ...strongest to answer: THIS is the last modified or created file !!!

Do you see what I mean ?

Bests Regards
Den

Re: Find the most recent file

Steven Schweda — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:14:55 GMT

There might be some clever perl thing (about
which I know nothing), and it'd be pretty
easy to do in DCL, but "recursively" makes it
hard in a UNIX-like environment. (At least
_I_ don't see an easy way to do it.)

"ls -Rt --full-time" would give you all the
information you need, but not in a convenient
form. The directory names are on separate
lines, but the first line after "total"
would be the newest file in that directory.
Combine the directory name with the file
name, sort by the date-time field(s), and
you're done.

You could also do a "find -type d" to do the
directory recursion, and in each directory do
the "ls -t --full-time" to get the newest
file there. Collect all those, and sort them
by the date-time field(s).

It looks to me like too much work.

Why do you care?

Re: Find the most recent file

smatador — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:50:36 GMT

I don't try it yet but it seem very interesting. Look at this script
http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/newest

Re: Find the most recent file

James R. Ferguson — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 22:41:52 GMT

Hi Den:

I'll use Perl for the reason that Steven cited.

There is _NO_ such thing as a creation timestamp in Unix or Linux. The 'ctime' field of the stat() structure is the last _change_ timestamp for an inode. Changing the permissions, ownership or name of a file or directory alters this timestamp. Writing to a file alters the 'mtime'.

This Perl script will return _files_ in the order of their last modification timestampe (or 'mtime'). Specifiy one or more directories to recursively search. If no arguments are given, your current working directory will be used. The files are sorted in descending age (newest first) thus allowing you to (conveniently) take the 'head' of the list returned:

# cat ./fileage
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Find;
my @a;
my @paths = @ARGV ? @ARGV : ('.');
find( sub { push @a, [ $File::Find::name, ( stat($_) )[9] ] if -f $_ },
@paths );
for ( sort { $b->[1] <=> $a->[1] } @a ) {
print join " ", scalar localtime( @$_[1] ), @$_[0], "\n";
}
1;

# ./fileage /root |head -3
Tue Apr 28 14:26:45 2009 /root/.sh_history
Sat Apr 25 14:40:02 2009 /root/bigfile
Thu Apr 16 15:18:21 2009 /root/jrfsig.pl

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: Find the most recent file

Mike Stroyan — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:50:13 GMT

You could use the stat command to get modification time in a convenient format.
Then the sort command would be able to order the files by time.

find . -exec stat -c '%Y %n' {} \; | sort -n | less

There may be many files with the same modification time.
One second resolution is actually a very long time for a fast computer.

Re: Find the most recent file

Mark McDonald_2 — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 06:07:28 GMT

find . -exec ls -lt {} \; | grep -v "^total" | head -1

Then you can use cut or awk to get only the file name.

Re: Find the most recent file

Mark McDonald_2 — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 06:10:27 GMT

Sorry - that will give dirs too, so:

find . -exec ls -lt {} \; | grep -v "^total" | grep -v "^d" | head -1

Then you can use cut or awk to get only the file name.

Re: Find the most recent file

Mark McDonald_2 — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 06:16:57 GMT

Sorry - It worked on a small structure I created (maybe by fluke) but doesnt work on larger numbers of files.

Re: Find the most recent file

Leo The Cat — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:12:10 GMT

Variations presented here give some intersting clues.

Thanks to all