Get the newest directory in bash to a variables

Question

I would like to find the newest sub directory in a directory and save the result to variable in bash.

Something like this:

ls -t /backups | head -1 &         


        

Answer 1

This ia a pure Bash solution:

topdir=/backups
BACKUPDIR=

# Handle subdirectories beginning with '.', and empty $topdir
shopt -s dotglob nullglob

for file in "$topdir"/* ; do
    [[ -L $file || ! -d $file ]] && continue
    [[ -z $BACKUPDIR || $file -nt $BACKUPDIR ]] && BACKUPDIR=$file
done

printf 'BACKUPDIR=%q\n' "$BACKUPDIR"

It skips symlinks, including symlinks to directories, which may or may not be the right thing to do. It skips other non-directories. It handles directories whose names contain any characters, including newlines and leading dots.