Bash: Return the most recently edited file in a specified directory

Question

For a bash script I am currently developing I want to access the name of the most recently edited file (including folders but not subdirectories) in a specified directory. How do I do this?

Answer 1

As @fedorqui suggested You can do:

ls -1t | awk '{ print $9; exit}'

Old post:

You can get it using awk and tail

ls -lrt /path/to/folder/ | tail -1 | awk '{ print $9 }'

Answer 2

ls -t /path/to/folder/ | sed -n 1p

^{-t sorts ls by date modified. The output is piped to sed to get the first line of the output.}

Answer 3

Parsing ls is helpful in most of the cases, but sometimes it is not a good idea.

To have a 100% sure solution, you can use the find command and make it print the last time all files were accessed. By printing it in a numeric way, they you can sort the list and print the last one.

find /your/path -maxdepth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 stat -c "%Y %n" | sort -n | tail -1 | cut -d' ' -f2-

Explanation

• -maxdepth 1 does not go deeper in the directory structure.
• xargs -0 stat -c "%Y %n" gets the file name and prints its time of last modification plus the name of the file. (from man stat: "%Y time of last modification, seconds since Epoch")
• sort -n orders the list numerically, being the first the oldest.
• tail -1 gets the last of the list.
• cut -d' ' -f2- removes the printing of the datetime.