How can I list ls the 5 last modified files in a directory

Question

I know ls -t will list all files by modified time   But how can I limit these results to only the last n files

User · Accepted Answer

Try using head or tail  If you want the 5 most-recently modified files   ls -1t   head -5   The -1  that s a one  says one file per line and the head says take the first 5 entries   If you want the last 5 try   ls -1t   tail -5

User · Answer

Use tail command   ls -t   tail -n 5

User · Answer

The accepted answer lists only the filenames  but to get the top 5 files one can also use   ls -lht   head -6  where   -l outputs in a list format  -h makes output human readable  i e  file sizes appear in kb  mb  etc    -t sorts output by placing most recently modified file first  head -6 will show 5 files because ls prints the block size in the first line of output   I think this is a slightly more elegant and possibly more useful approach   Example output   total 26960312 -rw-r--r--   1 user  staff   1 2K 11 Jan 11 22 phone2 7 py -rw-r--r--   1 user  staff   2 7M 10 Jan 15 26 03-cookies-1 pdf -rw-r--r--   1 user  staff   9 2M  9 Jan 16 21 Wk1 sem pdf -rw-r--r--   1 user  staff   502K  8 Jan 10 20 lab-01 pdf -rw-rw-rw-   1 user  staff   2 0M  5 Jan 22 06 0410-1 wmv

User · Answer

ls -t list files by creation time not last modified time  Use ls -ltc if you want to list files by last modified time from last to first top to bottom   Thus to list the last n  ls -ltc   head   n

User · Answer

By default ls -t sorts output from newest to oldest  so the combination of commands to use depends in which direction you want your output to be ordered   For the newest 5 files ordered from newest to oldest  use head to take the first 5 lines of output   ls -t   head -n 5   For the newest 5 files ordered from oldest to newest  use the -r switch to reverse ls s sort order  and use tail to take the last 5 lines of output   ls -tr   tail -n 5

[linux] How can I list (ls) the 5 last modified files in a directory?

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