How to recursively find and list the latest modified files in a directory with subdirectories and times

Question

Operating system  Linux  Filesystem type  ext3  Preferred solution  Bash  script one-liner   Ruby  or Python   I have several directories with several subdirectories and files in them  I need to make a list of all these directories that is constructed in a way such that every first-level directory is listed next to the date and time of the latest created modified file within it  To clarify  if I touch a file or modify its contents a few subdirectory levels down  that timestamp should be displayed next to the first-level directory name  Say I have a directory structured like this    alfa beta gamma example txt  and I modify the contents of the file example txt  I need that time displayed next to the first-level directory alfa in human readable form  not epoch  I ve tried some things using find  xargs  sort and the like  but I can t get around the problem that the filesystem timestamp of  alfa  doesn t change when I create modify files a few levels down

User · Answer

Try this     bin bash stat --format  y   ls -t   find alfa  -type f    head -n 1   It uses find to gather all files from the directory  ls to list them sorted by modification date  head for selecting the first file and finally stat to show the time in a nice format  At this time it is not safe for files with whitespace or other special characters in their names  Write a commend if it doesn t meet your needs yet

User · Answer

I have this alias in my  profile that I use quite often    alias   grep xlogs xlogs  sudo find      -name  quot   log quot  -o -name  quot   trc quot     -mtime -1   sudo xargs ls -ltr --color   less -R   So it does what you are looking for  with exception it doesn t traverse change date time multiple levels  - looks for latest files    log and   trc files in this case   also it only finds files modified in the last day  and then sorts by time and pipes the output through less  sudo find      -name  quot   log quot  -o -name  quot   trc quot     -mtime -1   sudo xargs ls -ltr --color   less -R  PS   Notice I don t have root on some of the servers  but always have sudo  so you may not need that part

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GNU find  see man find  has a -printf parameter for displaying the files in Epoch mtime and relative path name  redhat gt  find   -type f -printf   T   P n    sort -n   awk   print  2

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I m showing this for the latest access time  and you can easily modify this to do latest modification time  There are two ways to do this    If you want to avoid global sorting which can be expensive if you have tens of millions of files  then you can do  position yourself in the root of the directory where you want your search to start    Linux gt  touch -d  0  tmp a   Linux gt  find   -type f -exec tcsh -f -c test  stat --printf  quot  X quot      -gt   stat --printf  quot  X quot   tmp a     -exec tcsh -f -c touch -a -r     tmp a   -print  The above method prints filenames with progressively newer access time and the last file it prints is the file with the latest access time  You can obviously get the latest access time using a  quot tail -1 quot    You can have find recursively print the name and access time of all files in your subdirectory and then sort based on access time and the tail the biggest entry   Linux gt   find   -type f -exec stat --printf  quot  X   n n quot           sort -n   tail -1    And there you have it

User · Answer

Both the Perl and Python solutions in this post helped me solve this problem on Mac OS X  How to list files sorted by modification date recursively  no stat command available   Quoting from the post  Perl  find   -type f -print   perl -l -ne                -M     store file age  mtime - now      END               quot  n quot           print sort      b   lt   gt      a   keys        print by decreasing age         Python  find   -type f -print   python -c  import os  sys  times      for f in sys stdin readlines    f   f 0 -1   times f    os stat f  st mtime for f in sorted times iterkeys    key lambda f times f    print f

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The following returns you a string of the timestamp and the name of the file with the most recent timestamp  find  Directory -type f -printf  quot  TY- Tm- Td- TH- TM- TS  p n quot    sed -r  s     digit    2        digit    2     1- 2         sort --field-separator  -  -nrk1 -nrk2 -nrk3 -nrk4 -nrk5 -nrk6 -nrk7   head -n 1  Resulting in an output of the form   lt yy-mm-dd-hh-mm-ss nanosec gt   lt filename gt

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This is what I m using  very efficient   function find last      find  quot   1 -   quot  -type f -printf   TY- Tm- Td  TH  TM  P n  2 gt  dev null   sort   tail -n  quot   2 -10  quot      PROS   it spawns only 3 processes  USAGE  find last  dir  number    where   dir - a directory to be searched  current dir  number - number of newest files to display  10   Output for find last  etc 4 looks like this  2019-07-09 12 12 cups printers conf 2019-07-09 14 20 salt minion d  schedule conf 2019-07-09 14 31 network interfaces 2019-07-09 14 41 environment

User · Answer

Try this one      bin bash find  1 -type f -exec stat --format   Y   y  n            sort -nr   cut -d  -f2-   head   Execute it with the path to the directory where it should start scanning recursively  it supports filenames with spaces    If there are lots of files it may take a while before it returns anything  Performance can be improved if we use xargs instead      bin bash find  1 -type f -print0   xargs -0 stat --format   Y   y  n    sort -nr   cut -d  -f2-   head   which is a bit faster

User · Answer

For plain ls output  use this   There is no argument list  so it can t get too long   find     while read FILE do ls -d -l   FILE  done   And niceified with cut for just the dates  times  and name   find     while read FILE do ls -d -l   FILE  done   cut --complement -d     -f 1-5   EDIT  Just noticed that the current top answer sorts by modification date   That s just as easy with the second example here  since the modification date is first on each line - slap a sort onto the end   find     while read FILE do ls -d -l   FILE  done   cut --complement -d     -f 1-5   sort

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anubhava s answer is great  but unfortunately won t work on BSD tools     i e  it won t work with the find that comes installed by default on macOS  because BSD find doesn t have the -printf operator  So here s a variation that works with macOS   BSD  tested on my Catalina Mac   which combines BSD find with xargs and stat    find   -type f -print0           xargs -0 -n1 -I   stat -f   Fm  N   quot    quot            sort -rn   While I m here  here s BSD command sequence I like to use  which puts the timestamp in ISO-8601 format   find   -type f -print0         xargs -0 -n1 -I            stat  -f   Sm  N  -t   Y- m- d  H  M  S   quot    quot          sort -rn   note that both my answers  unlike  anubhava s  pass the filenames from find to xargs as a single argument rather than a  0 terminated list  which changes what gets piped out at the very end  And here s the GNU version  i e   anubhava s answer  but in iso-8601 format     gfind   -type f -printf  quot  T   p 0 quot    sort -zk1nr  Related q  find lacks the option -printf  now what

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Here is one version that works with filenames that may contain spaces  newlines  and glob characters as well  find   -type f -printf  quot  T   p 0 quot    sort -zk1nr   find     -printf prints the file modification time  Epoch value  followed by a space and  0 terminated filenames  sort -zk1nr reads NUL terminated data and sorts it reverse numerically  As the question is tagged with Linux  I am assuming GNU Core Utilities are available  You can pipe the above with  xargs -0 printf  quot  s n quot   to print the modification time and filenames sorted by modification time  most recent first  terminated by newlines

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To find all files whose file status was last changed N minutes ago  find -cmin -N  For example  find -cmin -5

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For those  who faced stat  unrecognized option  format  when executed the line from Heppo s answer  find  1 -type f -exec stat --format   Y   y  n   quot    quot       sort -nr   cut -d  -f2-   head  Please try the -c key to replace --format and finally the call will be  find  1 -type f -exec stat -c   Y   y  n   quot    quot       sort -nr   cut -d  -f2-   head  That worked for me inside of some Docker containers  where stat was not able to use --format option

User · Answer

This could be done with a recursive function in Bash too  Let F be a function that displays the time of file which must be lexicographically sortable yyyy-mm-dd  etc    OS-dependent   F    stat --format  y  quot  1 quot                     Linux F    ls -E  quot  1 quot  awk   print 6 quot   quot  7            SunOS  maybe this could be done easier  R  the recursive function that runs through directories  R    local f for f in  quot  1 quot    do   -d  quot  f quot    amp  amp R  f  F  quot  f quot  done    And finally for f in   do   -d  quot  f quot    amp  amp echo  R  quot  f quot  sort tail -1  quot   f quot  done

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I shortened Daniel B  hmer s awesome answer to this one-liner  stat --printf  quot  y  n n quot    ls -tr   find   -type f    If there are spaces in filenames  you can use this modification  OFS  quot  IFS quot  IFS    n  stat --printf  quot  y  n n quot    ls -tr   find   -type f   IFS  quot  OFS quot

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This should actually do what the OP specifies  One-liner in Bash    for first level in  find   -maxdepth 1 -type d   do find  first level -printf  quot  TY- Tm- Td  TH  TM  TS  first level n quot    sort -n   tail -n1   done  which gives output such as  2020-09-12 10 50 43 9881728000   2020-08-23 14 47 55 3828912000    cache 2018-10-18 10 48 57 5483235000    config 2019-09-20 16 46 38 0803415000    emacs d 2020-08-23 14 48 19 6171696000    local 2020-08-23 14 24 17 9773605000    nano  This lists each first-level directory with the human-readable timestamp of the latest file within those folders  even if it is in a subfolder  as requested in   quot I need to make a list of all these directories that is constructed in a way such that every first-level directory is listed next to the date and time of the latest created modified file within it  quot

User · Answer

Quick Bash function    findLatestModifiedFiles directory   max 10   format  quot  Td  Tb  TY   TT quot     function findLatestModifiedFiles         local d  quot   1 -   quot      local m  quot   2 -10  quot      local f  quot   3 - Td  Tb  TY   TT  quot       find  quot  d quot  -type f -printf  quot  T    f  p n quot    sort -nr   cut -d  -f2-   head -n quot  m quot     Find the latest modified file in a directory  findLatestModifiedFiles  quot  home jason  quot  1  You can also specify your own date time format as the third argument

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Ignoring hidden files     with nice  amp  fast time stamp  Handles spaces in filenames well     not that you should use those     find   -type f -not -path         -printf   TY  Tm  Td  THh TM  Ta  p n   sort -nr  head -n 10  2017 01 28 07h00 Sat   recent 2017 01 21 10h49 Sat   hgb 2017 01 16 07h44 Mon   swx 2017 01 10 18h24 Tue   update-stations 2017 01 09 10h38 Mon   stations json   More find galore can be found by following the link

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You may give the printf command of find a try      Ak    File s  last  access  time  in   the format specified by k                         which is either    or a directive for the  C   strftime                         function    The  possible  values for k are listed   below                         some of them might not be available on all    systems   due                        to differences in  strftime  between systems

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This command works on Mac OS X  find  quot  1 quot  -type f -print0   xargs -0 gstat --format   Y   y  n    sort -nr   cut -d  -f2-   head On Linux  as the original poster asked  use stat instead of gstat  This answer is  of course  user37078 s outstanding solution  promoted from comment to full answer  I mixed in CharlesB s insight to use gstat on Mac  OS  X  I got coreutils from MacPorts rather than Homebrew  by the way  And here s how I packaged this into a simple command   bin ls-recent sh for reuse     bin bash   ls-recent  list files in a directory tree  most recently modified first     Usage  ls-recent path  -10   more      Where  quot path quot  is a path to target directory   quot -10 quot  is any argument to pass   to  quot head quot  to limit the number of entries  and  quot more quot  is a special argument   in place of  quot -10 quot  which calls the pager  quot more quot  instead of  quot head quot   if    quot more quot     quot  2 quot     then    H more  N    else    H head  N  2 fi  find  quot  1 quot  -type f -print0  xargs -0 gstat --format   Y   y  n         sort -nr  cut -d  -f2-   H  N

[linux] How to recursively find and list the latest modified files in a directory with subdirectories and times

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