I write a journal and name the files in a YYYY-MM-DD.markdown fashion. When I want to amend something to the last entry, I would like to open it with a shortcut, instead of writing out the full date (bash completion does not help at all).
How can I open the last file (in alphabetical order) in vim?
If it's really the last file:
vim $(find . -type f -maxdepth 1 | sort | tail -n 1)
Or to be more specific about markdown files:
vim $(find . -name "*.markdown" -maxdepth 1 | sort | tail -n 1)
You can of course create an alias for that in your bash profile.
alias newest='vim $(find . -name "*.markdown" -maxdepth 1 | sort | tail -n 1)'
Edited because xargs and vim causes some serious trouble after exiting it. Have to find out why this is. I also had backticks before, but using $() instead of backticks is the new way to go.
xargs is of course insecure. But: Turns out you can't use xargs and vim together anyway. See my edited post above, this should be easier.
find doesn't return sorted output, so the tail -n 1 will return the last item in the output of find which isn't necessarily the newest file. Adding a | sort after find should address this.
Commented
May 21, 2012 at 14:20
vim "$(ls -1 *.markdown | tail -n 1)"
Works with spaces in filenames, and does need neither find (which recurses by default, which might not be what you want) nor sort (output of ls is alphabetical by default).
