Ubuntu – Using LS To Show The Date Modified And A Specific Number Of Files

ls does not cache file names. It really does show you exactly what is currently on the file system. However, as @Ravan hinted, there may be similarly named files in your directory. These are typically runtime caches or lock files created by programs such as Vim and Emacs, but could be pretty much anything. For example, if I do the following in one terminal:

$ touch foo
$ vim foo

Then I'll see the following in another terminal:

$ ls -A
foo  .foo.swp

.foo.swp is a hidden temporary file which will be deleted if Vim exits nicely.

Such files can be safely deleted if they are left around from earlier editing sessions which are no longer open. Just make sure you quote the file names, since they may contain special characters like tilde (~):

$ rm '.foo~'

To find the last 5 modified files from a certain directory recursively, from that directory run:

find . -type f -printf '%T@ %p\n' | sort -k1,1nr | head -5

• %T@ with -printf predicate of find will get modification time since epoch for the files, %p will print the file names

• sort -k1,1nr will reverse numerically sort the result according to the epoch time

• head -5 will get us the last modified five file names

If you just want to search only in the current directory (not recursively), use stat:

stat -c '%Y %n' * | sort -k1,1nr | head -5

Or find:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf '%T@ %p\n' | sort -k1,1nr | head -5

Check man find and man stat to get more idea.