Help with finding the latest modified version of a file within directories

co21ss · December 13, 2012, 3:00pm

I am trying to look into multiple directories and pluck out the latest version of a specific file, regardless of where it sits within the directory structure.

Ex:

The file is a .xls file and could have a depth within the directory of anywhere from 1-5

Working directory - Folder1
Similar .xls files may be in Folder1/x1/x2/x3 and also Folder1/y1/y2, but I want to output only the latest modified .xls file to pipe into a cp command for use in a shell script.

I am using csh (I know, I know!) and any help in doing this would be appreciated.

I've tried using forms of find.-type f -name "*.xls" , but am not sure how to only take the latest from that listing of all the .xls files within the directory tree.

Thanks!

vpundit · December 13, 2012, 3:01pm

have you tried

ls -alt

Corona688 · December 13, 2012, 3:04pm

You don't give -l to ls when you want to automate it. Why bother getting username, file permissions, modified date and all that when all you're doing to do is throw it away?

You can use ls to sort the files by date with -t, then just grab the first.

find . -type f -name "*.xls" -exec ls -t '{}' '+' | head -n 1

co21ss · December 13, 2012, 3:28pm

Corona,
This works out very nicely to only output the last modified version of the .xls file.

However, I am open to any other more efficient methods, as this does take some time to search through 400+ subdirectories.

Thanks!

corona688:

You don't give -l to ls when you want to automate it. Why bother getting username, file permissions, modified date and all that when all you're doing to do is throw it away?

You can use ls to sort the files by date with -t, then just grab the first.
find . -type f -name "*.xls" -exec ls -t '{}' '+' | head -n 1

Corona688 · December 13, 2012, 3:34pm

To narrow down the search, you'll need to narrow down the search.

If it really could be anywhere at all within those 400 folders, you'll have to check them all.

If not, please specify where you do and don't need to look.

co21ss · December 13, 2012, 3:44pm

Unfortunately the latest checklist file (.xls) could be in any of the 400 folders, so I will need to search them all. Sadly the script will need to loop through this routine for a small sampling from an input array, but is much better than having to manually hunt down a checklist file and compare against others.

Thanks for your help!

Corona688 · December 13, 2012, 3:47pm

Disk cache should make finding the second and third files easier after you've searched once. The directory entries will be in memory and not need to be read from disk again.