System wide find and sort

Linux and Unix-Like Linux
1

Hi,
I need to look for a config file (ldap.conf) and pick the latest modified file.

`locate` tells me there are many ldap.conf's, some in /etc, /usr, /home, etc.

Is there some way I can sort them by last modified time via bash?
I was thinking maybe I could pipe the output of `locate` to `ls -lt` but that doesn't seem to work.

Any ideas?

2

how about:

find / -type f -name 'ldap.conf' 2>/dev/null | xargs ls -lt
3

that works fine, thanks, but it has to manually search the entire file system, right?

is it possible to use the mlocate database via locate or some other tool?

4

I've not tested this, and it is rough, as I am not a shell expert, but would this help:

for i in `locate ldap.conf`
do
ll $i
done

then you have them by location and date stamp assuming noatime is not being used on the file system

5

oh actually, i did `updatedb` and i just combined the locate command with xargs and that worked:

$ sudo updatedb && locate ldap.conf | xargs ls -lt

thanks for the reply though :slight_smile: