How can I quickly find the 20 most recently modified files on Mac OS X (instead of using Python)?

files osx

7,730

Solution 1

On Mac OS X (10.10.2), try this

find . -xdev -type f -print0 | xargs -0 stat -f "%m%t%Sm %N"

or run a stat directly

stat -f "%m%t%Sm %N" /path

From man stat

 In order to determine the three files that have been modified most recently, you could use the following format:

       > stat -f "%m%t%Sm %N" /tmp/* | sort -rn | head -3 | cut -f2-
       Apr 25 11:47:00 2002 /tmp/blah
       Apr 25 10:36:34 2002 /tmp/bar
       Apr 24 16:47:35 2002 /tmp/foo

You could easily replace 3 with 20 (-:

Solution 2

find . -xdev -type f -printf "%T@ %Tc %p\n" | sort -n | tail -20

7,730

ijt

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

ijt almost 2 years

Of course it's possible to take the output of find . -type f | xargs ls -l and pipe it to a Python script that would sort the lines and output the top 20.

But is there anything faster than that?
- DaleHarris541 over 9 years
  
  Pass -mtime or -mmin to find to reduce the number of entries the Python script has to parse and sort.
- Admin over 9 years
  
  Someone down-voted the question. Why?
- DaleHarris541 over 9 years
  
  Probably because this question is not unique to professional server administration; an end user might ask the same thing.
- Admin over 9 years
  
  I see, so this question should have been asked on stackoverflow.
- peterh over 9 years
  
  With brew (brew.sh) you can use good gnu tools.
Jay Wick over 9 years

That might work on Linux, but on Mac OS X, it says find: -printf: unknown primary or operator.
DaleHarris541 over 9 years

Try to trim the amount of data being piped to poor overworked sort.
peterh over 9 years

@ijt On OSX, with "brew" you can install usable gnu tools.
Jay Wick over 9 years

Which brew package has GNU find? brew install find turns up nothing.
ijt over 9 years

This works: time find . -xdev -type f -print0 | xargs -0 stat -f "%m%t%Sm %N" | sort -rn | head -n 20 | cut -f2-, but it took 2 minutes, 11 seconds, so it's not quick.
KM. over 9 years

You are searching the entire file system, so yes, it will take time. What is your definition of quick?
ijt over 9 years

I'm looking for under 50msec.
Hoov almost 8 years

This is how many files you can scan with different disk types in 50ms on paper, assuming 10ms, 50000ns, 20000ns and 10ns access times and ignoring overhead: HDD 5 files, SATA SSD 1000 files, PCIe SSD 2500 files, RAM disk 50 million files. Considering the numbers a RAM disk seems to be your only option if you absolutely need that speed. An alternative might be to cache the results.
Mark Setchell almost 3 years

brew install findutils should do the trick.