Ubuntu – List files appended with an order number

You say that "ls piped to head takes an awful long time to complete".

The cause of this is not ls, but the number of files in your directory. If you have 100,000 files in a single directory, any way of solving this problem would have to get information about all 100,000 files before it could even think about sorting them or printing any output.

If it's taking too long, the real solution is to split the files over multiple directories.

If you can't spread the files over several directories, is there any way you can narrow down the number of files to consider? e.g. if the file names include a date, maybe you can include a wildcard so the system doesn't have to sort 100,000 files. Or maybe they're sequentially numbered? (This may or may not help, but is worth trying.)

How many times are you trying to do this? Maybe it's worth saving/caching the output for re-use.

Now, a question.

Are you sure you mean "creation time" and not "change time"? Most tools can only display "change time", not "creation time".

Getting "creation time" is a very new thing, which requires an ext4 filesystem, and some tools that aren't easy to install.

If you want change time

Change time (ctime for short) means the time the attributes of the file last changed.

ls -c sorts by ctime.

You want the output in ascending order, not descending, so you need to reverse the output with the -r option too.

So you could do it like this:

ls -cr | head -n 100

A longer solution to the same problem using stat:

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -exec stat -c $'%Z\t%n' '{}' \; |
    sort -k 1n |
    cut -f 2 -d $'\t' |
    head -n 10 |
    sed -e 's/^\.\///'

but that runs slower than ls -cr on my system.

If you want modification time

Modification time (mtime for short) means the time the contents of the file last changed.

ls -t sorts by mtime.

Change ls -cr to ls -tr (best option) or change stat -c $'%Z\t%n' to stat -c $'%Y\t%n'.

If you need creation time

(crtime for short)

This is harder.

First, ensure the directory is on a filesystem that is formatted using ext4. You can use tune2fs -l <device name> to check this.

Then, there is a new stat format called %W, which can help you here. To get it, you'll have to download a version of GNU Coreutils released in October 2010 or after, extract it, compile it, and install it.

Then, depending on your kernel, this might work (haven't tried it).

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -exec stat -c $'%W\t%n' '{}' \; |
    sort -k 1n |
    cut -f 2 -d $'\t' |
    head -n 10 |
    sed -e 's/^\.\///'

See also:

• stat read crtime from ext4
• a Ruby script to access crtime on Linux

If you get errors about "'$\t'

The '$\t' notation requires bash or zsh: it will not work in dash or sh on Ubuntu. If you really need to use those shells, you will need to change any \t to Ctrl+V, Tab and remove the leading $ from just before the opening quote.

Assuming you are using bash, either add the following to your ~/.bashrc:

bind '"\e[6~": menu-complete'
bind '"\e[5~": menu-complete-backward'

Or to change the defaults for all programs that use the readline completion library, not just bash, create the file ~/.inputrc containing:

$include /etc/inputrc
"\e[6~": menu-complete
"\e[5~": menu-complete-backward

Now when you open a new terminal, you can press:

• TAB as normal to see available completions.
• Pg Dn to select the first completion or change to the next one.
• Pg Up to select the last completion or change to the previous one.
• Alt+n Pg Dn to select the nth completion or move forward n completions.

So for your example type Pg DnPg Dn or Alt+2Pg Dn to get the second file aww.txt.