to pick the latest file modified in a directory

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I wan to pick the latest modified file name and redirect it to a file ..

ls -tr | tail -1 >file

but this is printing file ins side the filename ,

can anyone help me out

2 
ls -lrt | tail -1 | awk '{print $NF}' > file
3

ya the above command also gives the same output

$ ls -lrt | tail -1 | awk '{print $NF}' > file
$ cat file
file
4

Because by the time the command ls -tr is run the re-directed filename becomes the latest one and hence the same file-name gets stored in the same file. Try

echo $(ls -tr | tail -1) > newfile.txt

But if you run once again you get the file newfile.txt appended to itself. Check by replacing > with >>. If you need a permanent solution then redirect the output file to a file present in different location.

Or could execute in a sub-shell

(ls -tr|tail -1 > newfile.txt)

# Which when run once again has newfile.txt stored in itself.

5

echo $(ls -tr | tail -1) > newfile.txt
is the best solution for it....

6

ya that worked .. thanks everyone