Re: find/ls most recent files

[Martin Dickopp <martin-deb@zero-based.org>]

Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca> writes:

> I have a directory that's gotten out of hand with several hundred
> files.  I'm looking foractive files, and normally would do 
> ls -tr 
> to find the most recently-modified files -- but the list is so huge
> it's difficult.  So I tried:
>
> find . -maxdepth 1 -f file -atime -2 

-atime looks at the access time, not the modification time.

> but while this seems to return the right files (can't be sure) they're
> not sorted by time.  So what solutions do other people use?

Depending on whether you really mean the modification time or access
time,

  find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -mtime -2 -printf '%TY-%Tm-%Td %TT %p\n' | sort

or

  find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -atime -2 -printf '%AY-%Am-%Ad %AT %p\n' | sort

should work. (Assuming you have no files with newline characters in the
filename.)

Martin