My shortest method uses zsh:
print -rl -- **/*(.Om)
(add the D glob qualifiers if you also want to list the hidden files or the files in hidden directories).
If you have GNU find, make it print the file modification times and sort by that. I assume there are no newlines in file names.
find . -type f -printf '%T@ %p\n' | sort -k 1 -n | sed 's/^[^ ]* //'
If you have Perl (again, assuming no newlines in file names):
find . -type f -print |
perl -l -ne '
$_{$_} = -M; # store file age (mtime - now)
END {
$,="\n";
print sort {$_{$b} <=> $_{$a}} keys %_; # print by decreasing age
}'
If you have Python (again, assuming no newlines in file names):
find . -type f -print |
python -c 'import os, sys; times = {}
for f in sys.stdin.readlines(): f = f[0:-1]; times[f] = os.stat(f).st_mtime
for f in sorted(times.iterkeys(), key=lambda f:times[f]): print f'
If you have SSH access to that server, mount the directory over sshfs on a better-equipped machine:
mkdir mnt
sshfs server:/path/to/directory mnt
zsh -c 'cd mnt && print -rl **/*(.Om)'
fusermount -u mnt
With only POSIX tools, it's a lot more complicated, because there's no good way to find the modification time of a file. The only standard way to retrieve a file's times is ls, and the output format is locale-dependent and hard to parse.
If you can write to the files, and you only care about regular files, and there are no newlines in file names, here's a horrible kludge: create hard links to all the files in a single directory, and sort them by modification time.
set -ef # disable globbing
IFS='
' # split $(foo) only at newlines
set -- $(find . -type f) # set positional arguments to the file names
mkdir links.tmp
cd links.tmp
i=0 list=
for f; do # hard link the files to links.tmp/0, links.tmp/1, …
ln "../$f" $i
i=$(($i+1))
done
set +f
for f in $(ls -t [0-9]*); do # for each file, in reverse mtime order:
eval 'list="${'$i'} # prepend the file name to $list
$list"'
done
printf %s "$list" # print the output
rm -f [0-9]* # clean up
cd ..
rmdir links.tmp
This is really a job for zsh.
vim my_dir/*(om[1])
The bits in parentheses are glob qualifiers. The * before is a regular glob pattern, for example if you wanted to consider only log files you could use *.log. The o glob qualifier changes the order in which the matches are sorted; om means sort by modification time, most recent first. The [ glob qualifier means to only return some of the matches: [1] returns the first match, [2,4] return the next three, [-2,-1] return the last two and so on. If the files have names that begin with their timestamp, *([1]) will suffice.
In other shells, there's no good way to pick the most recent file. If your file names don't contain unprintable characters or newlines, you can use
vim "$(ls -t mydir | head -n 1)"
If you want to pick the first or last file based on the name, there is a fully reliable and portable method, which is a bit verbose for the command line but perfectly serviceable in scripts.
set -- mydir/*
first_file_name=$1
eval "last_file_name=\${$#}"
Best Answer
There are six very commonly used tools to solve similar problems:
find, to look for files or directories matching specific entries.The
-mindepthand-maxdepthoptions control how deep in the filesystem tree (relative to the specified names, which are always at depth 0) the command will work on.The
-typeoption is useful for restricting consideration to files, directories, symbolic links, or devices.The
-printfoption is extremely useful, as it makes the command print out the information on the matching names (directory items) in the desired format. I particularly like%TY%Tm%Td %TT %p\n, which prints the date and time of the last modification, and full path and name of each match on each line, using formatYYYYMMDD HH:MM:SS.sss PATH. This format sorts correctly, you see. For last access, use%AY%Am%Ad %AT %p\n, but note that access timestamps are not recorded at all ifnoatimemount option is used, or ifrelatimemount option is used, access timestamps are only modified for the first access after a modification; least-recently-used checking is thus not reliable. (Least-recently-modified list, however, is pretty reliable; the users can modify the timestamps by hand, but otherwise they are maintained automatically.)sortto sort the output.The
-d,-g,-h,-M, and-noptions define how items are compared, and the-Roption makes the order random.The
-roption can be used to reverse the sort order (used in addition to one of the above options).The
-toption redefines how fields (columns) are defined; by default, blanks (spaces and tabs) separate columns.The
-koption can be used to define which part of each line is considered the sort key; by default, the entire line is considered.uniqis often used after sorting to combine multiple consecutive items into one -- so that only the unique lines are output.cutis the simplest way to pick only specific columns from each line in the output.The
-foption chooses the fields to be printed. (By default, lines with at most one field (no separators) are printed; option-ssuppresses printing such lines.)The
-doption can be used to redefine the definition of a field; by default, blanks separate fields.sedis a powerful stream editor, which applies regular expressions to the input, filtering and modifying it as needed.awkis an interpreter for the awk language. Awk scripts are basically collections of actions, snippets of code, that are executed for each line (or before or after all processing, or if the line (or record) matches some rule).This particular problem can be solved using three of the above commands in a simple pipeline: use
findto find files at the desired depths of the tree, printing a sortable date and time for each file, plus the relative path to the file; sort the output; remove the date and time part of each line, leaving just the relative path to each file on each line.