Shell Scripting – Sort Files Recursively by Last Modified Date

On recent versions of find (e.g. GNU 4.4.0) you can use the -newermt option. For example, to find all files that have been modified on the 2011-02-08

$ find /var/www/html/dir/ -type f -name "*.php" -newermt 2011-02-08 ! -newermt 2011-02-09

Also note that you don't need to pipe into grep to find php files because find can do that for you in the -name option.

Take a look at this SO answer for more suggestions: How to use 'find' to search for files created on a specific date?

In zsh it's as easy as

array=(*.sh(Nom))

The glob qualifier om causes the matches to be sorted by modification time (newest first), and N forces the array to be empty if there is no match (instead of causing an error).

In other shells such as bash, there's no good way of sorting by time. You can use ls -t, but that can break because the output is ambiguous. If you know that your file names only contain characters that ls considers to be printable, and that are not whitespace or \[*?, then you can use a command substitution:

array=($(ls -t -- *.sh 2>/dev/null))

You can make this more robust by protecting wildcard characters and horizontal whitespace, but newlines and nonprintable characters remain a problem.

IFS=$'\n'; set -f
array=($(ls -t -- *.sh 2>/dev/null))
unset IFS; set +f

Except in zsh, don't forget the double quotes when refering to the value of a variable, as well as -- to protect files whose name begins with a dash and would otherwise be interpreted as options, e.g. rm -- "${array[0]}"