Shell – Opening most recently modified file in vim

datefilespipeshellvi

The following commands work

$ ls -1t | head -1
git_sync_log20180924_00.txt

$ vi git_sync_log20180924_00.txt

But this does not

$ ls -1t | head -1 | vi
Vim: Warning: Input is not from a terminal
Vim: Error reading input, exiting...
Vim: preserving files...
Vim: Finished.

How can I accomplish this (open most recently modified file in vi)?

Best Answer

vi -- "$(ls -t | head -n 1)"

(that assumes file names don't contain newline characters).

Or if using zsh:

vi ./*(om[1])

Or:

vi ./*(.om[1])

To only consider regular files.

vi ./*(.Dom[1])

To also consider hidden files (as if using ls -At).

Those work regardless of what characters or byte values the file names may contain. For a GNU shell&utilities equivalent of that latter one, you can do:

IFS= read -rd '' file < <(
  find . ! -name . -prune -type f -printf '%T@\t%p\0' | sort -zrn | cut -zf2-) &&
  vi "$file"

Related Solutions

Shell – Access the most recent file in (alphabetically sorted) directory

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=$1
eval "last_file_name=\${$#}"

Bash – How to Reference the Most Recently Modified File in Command Line

evince "$(ls -t | head -n1)"

While it will handle spaces, tabs, and (I believe) printing specials, it will break if the filename contains a newline, and possibly on some other non-printing characters.

Best Answer

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Shell – Access the most recent file in (alphabetically sorted) directory

Bash – How to Reference the Most Recently Modified File in Command Line

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