Finding most recently edited file in python

Question

I have a set of folders, and I want to be able to run a function that will find the most recently edited file and tell me the name of the file and the folder it is in.

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Answer 1

It helps to wrap the built in directory walking to function that yields only full paths to files. Then you can just take the function that returns all files and pick out the one that has the highest modification time:

import os

def all_files_under(path):
    """Iterates through all files that are under the given path."""
    for cur_path, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(path):
        for filename in filenames:
            yield os.path.join(cur_path, filename)

latest_file = max(all_files_under('root'), key=os.path.getmtime)