How to recursively find the latest modified file in a directory

Question

It seems that ls doesn t sort the files correctly when doing a recursive call   ls -altR     head -n 3   How can I find the most recently modified file in a directory  including subdirectories

User · Answer

I faced the same issue  I need to find the most recent file recursively  find took around 50 minutes to find   Here is a little script to do it faster      bin sh  CURRENT DIR      zob          FILE   ls -Art1   CURRENT DIR    tail -n 1      if     -f   FILE     then         CURRENT DIR    CURRENT DIR    FILE           zob     fi     echo  FILE     exit   zob   It s a recursive function who get the most recent modified item of a directory  If this item is a directory  the function is called recursively and search into this directory  etc

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This seems to work fine  even with subdirectories   find   -type f   xargs ls -ltr   tail -n 1   In case of too many files  refine the find

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After using a find-based solution for years  I found myself wanting the ability to exclude directories like  git  I switched to this rsync-based solution  Put this in   bin findlatest     bin sh   Finds most recently modified files  rsync -rL --list-only  quot    quot    grep -v   d    sort -k3 4r   head -5  Now findlatest   will list the 5 most recently modified files  and findlatest --exclude  git   will list the 5 excluding ones in  git  This works by taking advantage of some little-used rsync functionality   quot if a single source arg is specified  to rsync  without a destination  the files are listed in an output format similar to ls -l quot   rsync man page   The ability to take rsync args is useful in conjunction with rsync-based backup tools  For instance I use rsnapshot  and I back up an application directory with rsnapshot conf line  backup   var atlassian application-data jira current    home     rsync long args --archive --filter  quot merge  opt atlassian jira current backups rsync-excludes quot   where rsync-excludes lists directories I don t want to backup  - log  - logs  - analytics-logs  - tmp  - monitor   rrd4j  I can see now the latest files that will be backed up with  findlatest  var atlassian application-data jira current  --filter  quot merge  opt atlassian jira current backups rsync-excludes quot

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This gives a sorted list   find   -type f -ls 2 gt  dev null   sort -M -k8 10   head -n5   Reverse the order by placing a  -r  in the sort command  If you only want filenames  insert  awk   print  11      before    head

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I find the following shorter and with more interpretable output   find   -type f -printf   TF  TT  p n    sort   tail -1   Given the fixed length of the standardised ISO format datetimes  lexicographical sorting is fine and we don t need the -n option on the sort   If you want to remove the timestamps again  you can use   find   -type f -printf   TFT TT  p n    sort   tail -1   cut -f2- -d

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To search for files in  target directory and all its sub-directories  that have been modified in the last 60 minutes     find  target directory -type f -mmin -60   To find the most recently modified files  sorted in the reverse order of update time  i e   the most recently updated files first      find  etc -type f -printf   TY- Tm- Td  TT  p n    sort -r

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If running stat on each file individually is to slow you can use xargs to speed things up a bit   find   -type f -print0   xargs -0 stat -f   m  N    sort -n   tail -1   cut -f2- -d

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This recursively changes the modification time of all directories in the current directory to the newest file in each directory   for dir in     do find  dir -type f -printf   T    p  n    sort -n   tail -1   cut -f2- -d      xargs -I    touch -r     dir  done

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I wrote a pypi github package for this question because I needed a solution as well   https   github com bucknerns logtail  Install   pip install logtail   Usage  tails changed files  logtail  lt log dir gt    lt glob match  default   log gt     Usage2  Opens latest changed file in editor  editlatest  lt log dir gt    lt glob match  default   log gt

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I had the trouble to find the last modified file under Solaris 10  There find does not have the printf option and stat is not available  I discovered the following solution which works well for me   find   -type f   sed  s      amp       xargs ls -E   awk    print  6      7      sort   tail -1   To show the filename as well use  find   -type f   sed  s      amp       xargs ls -E   awk    print  6      7      9      sort   tail -1   Explanation   find   -type f finds and lists all files sed  s      amp     wraps the pathname in quotes to handle whitespaces xargs ls -E sends the quoted path to ls  the -E option makes sure that a full timestamp  format year-month-day hour-minute-seconds-nanoseconds  is returned awk    print  6      7    extracts only date and time awk    print  6      7      9    extracts date  time and filename sort returns the files sorted by date tail -1 returns only the last modified file

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find   -type f -printf   T   p n      sort -n   tail -1   cut -f2- -d quot   quot   For a huge tree  it might be hard for sort to keep everything in memory   T  gives you the modification time like a unix timestamp  sort -n sorts numerically  tail -1 takes the last line  highest timestamp   cut -f2 -d quot   quot  cuts away the first field  the timestamp  from the output  Edit  Just as -printf is probably GNU-only  ajreals usage of stat -c is too  Although it is possible to do the same on BSD  the options for formatting is different  -f  quot  m  N quot  it would seem  And I missed the part of plural  if you want more then the latest file  just bump up the tail argument

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Shows the latest file with human readable timestamp   find   -type f -printf   TY- Tm- Td  TH  TM   Tz  p n   sort -n   tail -n1   Result looks like this   2015-10-06 11 30   0200   foo bar txt   To show more files  replace -n1 with a higher number

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I found the command above useful  but for my case I needed to see the date and time of the file as well I had an issue with several files that have spaces in the names  Here is my working solution   find   -type f -printf   T   p n    sort -n   tail -1   cut -f2- -d      sed  s      amp       xargs ls -l

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On Ubuntu 13  the following does it  maybe a tad faster  as it reverses the sort and uses  head  instead of  tail   reducing the work   To show the 11 newest files in a tree   find   -type f -printf   T   p n    sort -n -r   head -11    cut -f2- -d      sed -e  s          xargs ls -U -l  This gives a complete ls listing without re-sorting and omits the annoying      that  find  puts on every file name   Or  as a bash function   treecent        local numl   if    0 -eq         then     numl 11     Or whatever default you want    else     numl  1   fi   find   -type f -printf   T   p n    sort -n -r   head -  numl     cut -f2- -d      sed -e  s           xargs ls -U -l     Still  most of the work was done by plundra s original solution   Thanks plundra

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This simple cli will also work   ls -1t   head -1   You may change the -1 to the number of files you want to list

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I use something similar all the time  as well as the top-k list of most recently modified files   For large directory trees  it can be much faster to avoid sorting  In the case of just top-1 most recently modified file   find   -type f -printf   T   p n    perl -ne   a split   s        2     t  f   a if  a 0  gt  t  print  f if eof      On a directory containing 1 7 million files  I get the most recent one in 3 4s  a speed-up of 7 5x against the 25 5s solution using sort

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Following up on  plundra s answer  here s the BSD and OS X version  find   -type f -print0     xargs -0 stat -f  quot  m  N quot      sort -rn   head -1   cut -f2- -d quot   quot

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I prefer this one  it is shorter   find   -type f -print0 xargs -0 ls -drt tail -n 1

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Instead of sorting the results and keeping only the last modified ones  you could use awk to print only the one with greatest modification time  in unix time    find   -type f -printf   T  0 p 0    awk                 if   0 gt max                max  0               getline mostrecent           else              getline            END print mostrecent   RS   0    This should be a faster way to solve your problem if the number of files is big enough   I have used the NUL character  i e    0   because  theoretically  a filename may contain any character  including space and newline  but that   If you don t have such pathological filenames in your system you can use the newline character as well   find   -type f -printf   T  n p n    awk                 if   0 gt max                max  0               getline mostrecent           else              getline            END print mostrecent   RS   n    In addition  this works in mawk too

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Ignoring hidden files     with nice  amp  fast time stamp    find   -type f -not -path         -printf   TY  Tm  Td  THh TM  Ta  p n   sort -nr  head -n 10   Result  Handles spaces in filenames well     not that these should be used   2017 01 25 18h23 Wed   indenting Shifting blocks visually mht 2016 12 11 12h33 Sun   tabs Converting tabs to spaces mht 2016 12 02 01h46 Fri   advocacy 2016 Vim or Emacs - Which text editor do you prefer  mht 2016 11 09 17h05 Wed   Word count - Vim Tips Wiki mht   More  More find galore following the link

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The following command worked on Solaris    find   -name   zip  -type f   xargs ls -ltr   tail -1

[bash] How to recursively find the latest modified file in a directory?

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