Recursive Directory search, Showing most recent file in folder

Question

Can someone point out where am going wrong please. Am doing a directory search (Based on the folder structure and file type) The folder structure is the same for every customer. Just the customer folder is named differently. Example of structure:

• Httpdocs/client1/channel1/backup
• Httpdocs/client5/channel5/backup
• Httpdocs/client8/channel1/backup

This partially works, It just shows me ALL files in the backup folder apposed to the most recent file.

#!/bin/bash

# Array of root folders
#folders=("a" "b")
array=(httpdocs/*\/client1/backup/*.xml)

# Search all specified root folders
for dir in "${array[@]}"; 
do echo "$dir";
    # date of each file with "stat"
    find -path $array -type f -exec stat -f "%m,%N" {} ';' | \
        # sort by date, most recent first
        sort -gr | \
        # extract first (most recent) file
        head -1 | \
        # return file name only
        cut -d, -f2
done

head appears to not be working. Any reason why? is my formatting wrong?

i also tried:

find -path "*\/chanel1/backup/*.xml" -type f | sort -gr | head -1 | cut -d, -f2

This just outputs the Last folder in the list with the latest file in that folder. (I have to run this within Web Root (Httpdocs))

Answer 1

I'd use something more like your last approach, such as

for d in $(find httpdocs -type d -name backup) do ls -t $d | grep '.xml$' | head -1 done

ls -t sorts by modified time, most recent first.

If you want the full pathname in the output, you can use ls -t $d/*.xml and skip the grep. There are simple but non-obvious ways to shorten the pathname if you wish, like sed or dirname.