Files – How to Find Newest File with Multiple Filetype Restrictions

filesfindsorttimestamps

I want to write a command that gives me the newest file in a directory recursively. But that's not my only limitation. The files has to be an mp3 or a jpg file. (case insensitive prefered)
I only need the creating date of that newest file. If possible I want it formatted like this:
30-12-2014 (so: day-month-year)

This is currently wath I've got:

find .  -name '*.mp3' -or -name '*.JPG'   -printf "%TD \n" | sort -rn | head -n 1

But it doesn't work well. I only get JPG's and the date isn't formatted.

Best Answer

Something like this should work:

find . \( -iname "*.mp3" -o -iname "*.jpg" \) -printf '%TY%Tm%Td %TT %p\n' | sort -r

This should find the files that (case-insensitively) find files ending with mp3 or jpg, print out the modification time, then sort it in reverse order.

It seems to show both file-types when you run it effectively as two commands:

( find . -iname "*.mp3" -printf '%TY%Tm%Td %TT %p\n' ; find . -iname "*.jpg" -printf '%TY%Tm%Td %TT %p\n' ) | sort -r

Related Solutions

Find files in the order of timestamp

The order of files reported by find is opaque to the user. It can be the order they appear in the directory. Some find implementations reorder them by inode number or other criteria in an attempt to improve performance. The only way one may alter the order is via the -depth predicate that tells find to process/output leaves before the branch they're on.

As an alternative to find, you could use zsh's recursive glob feature:

zgrep whatever ./**/*.gz(D.Om)

The Om glob qualifier is to sort by last-modification time (oldest first). . is for regular-files only (equivalent of find's -type f), D is to include hidden (Dot) ones like find would by default.

If you get a arg list too long error, you can use zargs:

autoload -U zargs # best in ~/.zshrc
zargs ./**/*.gz(D.Om) -- zgrep whatever

With bash (or any shell supporting Ksh-style process substitution) and recent GNU tools, an equivalent would be:

xargs -r0a <(
  export LC_ALL=C
  find . -type f -name '*.gz' -printf '%T@\t%p\0' |
    sort -zn | cut -zf2-) zgrep whatever

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Find files in the order of timestamp

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