Linux and MacOS – How to List Files Recursively and Sort by Modification Time

linuxlsmacos

How do I list all files under a directory recursively and sort the output by modification time?

I normally use ls -lhtc but it doesn't find all files recursively. I am using Linux and Mac.

ls -l on Mac OS X can give

-rw-r--r--    1 fsr  user      1928 Mar  1  2011 foo.c
-rwx------    1 fsr  user      3509 Feb 25 14:34 bar.c

where the date part isn't consistent or aligned, so a solution have to take this into account.

Partial solution

stat -f "%m%t%Sm %N" ./* | sort -rn | head -3 | cut -f2-

works, but not recursively.

Best Answer

Here is a method using stat as @johnshen64 suggested

find . -type f -exec stat -f "%m%t%Sm %N" '{}' \; | sort -rn | head -20 | cut -f2-

Related Solutions

Linux ls – How to Recursively List All Files with Timestamps and Full Path

And another way to do it if your find doesn't support printf

find . -type f | xargs ls -al  | awk -v pwd="$PWD" '{ print $(NF-2), $(NF-1) , pwd substr($(NF), 2)}'

Note: This only works as long as there aren't any spaces in the filenames. Output looks like this:

2010-09-29 22:08 /home/nifle/ac.txt
2010-10-04 16:02 /home/nifle/array.sh
2010-10-05 23:32 /home/nifle/b.txt
2010-12-15 16:49 /home/nifle/barcopy/subbar/ghut
2010-12-15 16:48 /home/nifle/bardir/subbar/ghut
2010-09-29 22:16 /home/nifle/foo.gz
2010-09-29 22:16 /home/nifle/foo1.gz

Linux – Descending list ordered by file modification time

Use find and sort:

find YOUR_START_DIR -type f -print0 |
    xargs -r -0 ls -l | 
        sort -k 6.2,6.5nr \
             -k 6.7,6.8nr \
             -k 6.10,6.11nr \
             -k 7.2,7.3nr \
             -k 7.5,7.6nr

the long list of k options after sort define the year, month, day, hour and minute as sort keys and order by them in that order.

Files saved on the same minute won't get ordered. If you want to go down to seconds and more, add "--full-time" to the ls command, and add new keys at the end of the sort command.

Partial solution

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux ls – How to Recursively List All Files with Timestamps and Full Path

Linux – Descending list ordered by file modification time

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