in linux terminal, how do I show the folder's last modification date, taking its content into consideration?
Solution 1
Something like:
find /path/ -type f -exec stat \{} --printf="%y\n" \; |
sort -n -r |
head -n 1
Explanation:
- the find command will print modification time for every file recursively ignoring directories (according to the comment by IQAndreas you can't rely on the folders timestamps)
- sort -n (numerically) -r (reverse)
- head -n 1: get the first entry
Solution 2
If you have a version of find
(such as GNU find
) that supports -printf
then there's no need to call stat
repeatedly:
find /some/dir -printf "%T+\n" | sort -nr | head -n 1
or
find /some/dir -printf "%TY-%Tm-%Td %TT\n" | sort -nr | head -n 1
If you don't need recursion, though:
stat --printf="%y\n" *
Solution 3
If I could, I would vote for the answer by Paulo. I tested it and understood the concept. I can confirm it works.
The find
command can output many parameters.
For example, add the following to the --printf
clause:
%a for attributes in the octal format
%n for the file name including a complete path
Example:
find Desktop/ -exec stat \{} --printf="%y %n\n" \; | sort -n -r | head -1
2011-02-14 22:57:39.000000000 +0100 Desktop/new file
Let me raise this question as well: Does the author of this question want to solve his problem using Bash or PHP? That should be specified.
Solution 4
It seems to me that simply: ls -lt mydirectory
does the job...
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Frantisek
An aspiring writer hoping to one day write a video game.
Updated on July 05, 2022Comments
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Frantisek almost 2 years
So here's the deal. Let's say I have a directory named "web", so
$ ls -la drwx------ 4 rimmer rimmer 4096 2010-11-18 06:02 web
BUT inside this directory, web/php/
$ ls -la -rw-r--r-- 1 rimmer rimmer 1957 2011-01-05 08:44 index.php
That means that even though the content of my directory, /web/php/index.php has been last modified at 2011-01-05, the /web/ directory itself is reported as last modified at 2010-11-18.
What I need to do is have my /web/ directory's last modification date reported as the latest modification date of any file/directory inside this directory, recursively.
How do I go about doing this?
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Frantisek about 13 yearsGood question, I thought it was obvious though, as my tags say "bash, scripting, shell". I want to solve this problem using Bash, yes. It's for backing up server files. I think the problem is solved now, the solutions work perfect :)
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sappjw over 11 yearsAccording to the coreutils documentation, you might consider
head -n 1
orsed 1q
instead of the obsolete syntax. -
Paulo Scardine about 9 yearsSo
head -1
to return just the first line is now obsolete... Man, I remember when it used to be the new flag - I'm that old!!! :o) -
Ternary over 8 yearsThis is such a great example of the strength and weakness of the linux command line.
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IQAndreas about 8 yearsIn most cases, I would add the
-type f
flag, so it only checks the modification time of files. I can't remember which program it was I used, but when I copied files from one location to another, it kept the timestamps of the files, but marked the directories as brand new, throwing off the results. -
tripleee over 6 yearsYou seem to be using both
stat
and the built-in-printf
flag offind
, and then basically throwing away one of the results. I guess you should prefer the latter over the former, as outlined in a separate answer (no need to spawn a separate process for each file whenfind
already does it all in one process). -
dshaw over 3 yearsIt does not, but it's easy to think that.
ls -t
(or the--time
option) on a directory will show when that directory was created, but it will not reflect the last-modified time of files within that directory. -
Rodolfo Medina over 3 years`ls -lt mydirectory' shows to me the last-modified time of files and subdirs within that dir...
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yagus almost 3 yearsThis only works for files inside mydirectory, not for files inside any subdir in mydirectory. See this discussion.
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EugZol over 2 yearsWhat a user-friendly OS