Get most recent file in a directory on Linux

Question

Looking for a command that will return the single most recent file in a directory.

Not seeing a limit parameter to ls...

Answer 1

If you want to get the most recent changed file also including any subdirectories you can do it with this little oneliner:

find . -type f -exec stat -c '%Y %n' {} \; | sort -nr | awk -v var="1" 'NR==1,NR==var {print $0}' | while read t f; do d=$(date -d @$t "+%b %d %T %Y"); echo "$d -- $f"; done

If you want to do the same not for changed files, but for accessed files you simple have to change the

%Y parameter from the stat command to %X. And your command for most recent accessed files looks like this:

find . -type f -exec stat -c '%X %n' {} \; | sort -nr | awk -v var="1" 'NR==1,NR==var {print $0}' | while read t f; do d=$(date -d @$t "+%b %d %T %Y"); echo "$d -- $f"; done

For both commands you also can change the var="1" parameter if you want to list more than just one file.