Bash Shell – How to Display the Last N Modified Files

The following seems to work for me

 grep --color -E -- "$(ls -rtl | tail -n3)|$" <(ls -l)

It uses grep with highlight on input ls -l and uses a regular expression to search for either of the inputs for the three oldest command. It also search for the end-of-line $ in order to print the whole file.

You can also put it in a function, such that you can use lll * with multiple arguments, just as you would use ls

function lll ()
{
    command grep --color -E -- "$(ls -rtl $@ | tail -n3)|$" <(ls -l $@)
}

With GNU stat:

shopt -s dotglob

for file in dirA/*; do
    [[ -f "dirB/${file##*/}" ]] || continue
    if (( "$(stat -c %Y "$file")" > "$(stat -c %Y "dirB/${file##*/}")" )); then
        # take action
    fi
done