Re: find/ls most recent files

[David Landgren <david@landgren.net>]

RituRaj wrote:
> --- Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca> wrote:
>
> > 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 
>
>
> find . -maxdepth 1 -f file -atime -2 -exec ls -ltr
> {}\;

find . -maxdepth 1 -f file -atime -2 | xargs ls -ltr

is more efficient, and will probably produce more reliable (although not 
perfect) results.

I.e, the -t implies sorting the entire result set, but -exec runs each 
ls in isolation, so the resulting order depends entirely on the order 
that find emits them. If there are not too many files, the xargs 
approach will fire off a single ls process, thereby sorting the results 
in time order.

If you have many files and need to guarantee the time order (in order to 
process the oldest newest files first), the following should do the trick:

#! /usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use constant DELTA => 300; # five minutes

my $dir = shift || '.';
my $now = time;

opendir DIR, $dir or die "Cannot open directory $dir: $!\n";

print "$_\n" for
    sort { (stat "$dir/$b")[9] <=> (stat "$dir/$a")[9] }
    grep {
            $_ ne '.'
        and $_ ne '..'
        and ($now - (stat "$dir/$_")[9]) <= DELTA
    }
    readdir DIR;

closedir DIR;
__END__

The sort could use a Guttman-Rosler Transform to avoid excessive 
statting, but I'm feeling lazy :)

David