Timeline for Get most recent file in a directory on Linux
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 13 at 16:02 | comment | added | Timo |
@user, how can I invoke a cmd, e.g. unzip on the newest found file? I use -exec unzip{} which is not sorted by newest.
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| Jan 31 at 2:47 | comment | added | Tom Hale |
This breaks on filenames that include \n. Here is a safe version.
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| Nov 12, 2022 at 6:27 | comment | added | michael |
it probably goes without saying, but imho find is in many ways (for this specific question) preferable to ls, and can be used instead of ls in many of the other answers provided. But in this case, one would prefer not to have a recursive file listing. So to just list files in the current directory, add in find . -maxdepth 1 -type f .... etc etc
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| Sep 23, 2022 at 14:56 | comment | added | Mikhail T. |
The sort, cut, and tail combination can be replaced with a single awk looking for the maximum number -- then outputting the second field at the end. An O(n) operation rather than O(n*ln(n)), that sort requires: awk '$1 > latest { latest = $1; p = $2 } END { print p }'
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| Nov 8, 2021 at 14:37 | history | edited | Trevor Boyd Smith | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added english explanation of the command line because the `-f 2-` comment was not clear what the function/purpose was.
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| Jun 10, 2021 at 17:42 | comment | added | balu | IMO this is the most useful of all the answers here. Thank you! | |
| Dec 11, 2019 at 21:21 | comment | added | yoz |
@user's Mac version only sorts/displays date, not time. Here's a fixed version: find $DIR -type f -exec stat -lt "%F %T" {} \+ | cut -d' ' -f6- | sort -n | tail -1
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| Jul 27, 2017 at 8:33 | comment | added | Simon |
Very useful! I find it more friendly if piped to ls though: find ./ -type f -printf "%T@ %p\n" -ls | sort -n | cut -d' ' -f 2- | tail -n 1 | xargs -r ls -lah
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| May 14, 2017 at 11:48 | comment | added | Dennis Estenson |
As in the suggestion by chaos, if you reverse the sort by using sort -nr, you can use head -n 1 instead of tail -n 1 and improve efficiency slightly. (Although if you're sorting a recursive find, getting the first or last line won't be the slow part.)
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| Jan 11, 2017 at 21:29 | history | edited | gioele | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
updated to follow Kevin's suggestion
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| Jan 11, 2017 at 15:02 | comment | added | Kevin | Problem is the cut command truncates paths with spaces instead of -f 2 use -f2- to return fields 2 to the end of the line | |
| Oct 12, 2015 at 20:32 | comment | added | user |
Here's a solution for Mac: find $DIR -type f -exec stat -lt "%Y-%m-%d" {} \+ | cut -d' ' -f6- | sort -n | tail -1
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| Apr 12, 2014 at 18:15 | history | answered | gioele | CC BY-SA 3.0 |