Wednesday, September 04, 2024

Find recently updated files

The following task comes up once in a while, but I keep forgetting how to do it. So I decided to finally write it down.

Find the ten youngest directory entries in the current directory and all subdirectories:

find . -print0 | xargs -0 stat --format '%Y :%y %n' | sort -nr | cut -d: -f2- | head

Same task, but solely with regards to files (not directories):

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 stat --format '%Y :%y %n' | sort -nr | cut -d: -f2- | head

Note: In case no files/directories are found, the following error message may be returned: "stat: missing operand". 

Note also, that this may not work on non-Linux operating systems: For example, I've seen it fail on an old FreeBSD server where the stat command behaves very different from what I'm used to.


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