Want to sort files by update date including sub-directories

Question

I want to sort only files by update dates including sub-directories.

I found out ls -lrtR | grep ^-. but it doesn't seem to sort by update dates.

And I need to save this list into a file. Is it possible?

Apr 01 2010  InsideDoosanServiceImpl.class  // in A directory
Apr 08 2010  MainController.class  // in B directory
Apr 07 2010  RecommendController.class  // in B directory
Apr 01 2010  MainDao.class  // in B directory

I mean the whole list is not ordered by date, but first ordered by folder, and ordered by date.

I want a list first ordered by date including all sub-directories.

score 24 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 18 '12 at 07:41

24

With ls, -R will recurse directories and -t will sort by modification. However, it traverses directories recursively and applies -t to each directory. It doesn't accumulate all files from all directories and then sort. (As far as I understand, the latter is what you want)

With gnu find(1) you can specify the format of output to include the number of seconds since epoch and the filename, then you can pipe this to sort(1).

find . -type f -printf "%T@ %f\n" | sort -n > out.txt

answered Jan 18 '12 at 07:41

Rolf Rander

421

Yea GNU find does help. But OP works on AIX machines so GNU find wasn't available to him. – jaypal singh Jan 18 '12 at 07:52
It's too bad ls can't be made to accumulate files before sorting. ls is so fast compared to find. – Nathan Arthur Jan 27 '16 at 21:53
ls and find reads the same data, so I can't imagine any reason ls should be considerably faster than find. On my system find is 5 times faster (searching through roughly half a million files) – Rolf Rander Jan 27 '16 at 22:01
11

You might want a full date/time and not only the file name but also the path in the output, in that case, modify the formatting string: find . -type f -printf "%T@ %Tc %p\n" | sort -n > out.txt yielding output entries like 1427913836.2330520210 wed 1 apr 2015 20:43:56 ./subdir/file.txt. – Carl Feb 03 '16 at 23:08
Great. That really helped me out. I've been looking for a way to sort into subdirectories for ages! – bhu Boue vidya Apr 09 '18 at 01:14

score 22 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 27 '20 at 11:49

22

I am not sure what exactly do you mean by update dates, but you are using -r option which according to man does this -

-r Reverse the order of the sort to get reverse lexicographical order or the oldest entries first (or largest files last, if combined with sort by size

I think this should be good enough for you if you need files sorted by time.

ls -lRt

If you don't need all the other stuff listed by ls then you can use -

ls -1Rt

To capture the result in a file, you can use the redirection operator > and give a file name. So you can do something like this -

ls -lRt > sortedfile.list

Update:

find . -type f -exec ls -lt {} +

This will sort files so that the newest files are listed first. To reverse the sort order, showing newest files at the end, use the following command:

find . -type f -exec ls -lrt {} +

edited Nov 27 '20 at 11:49

Per Lundberg

111

answered Jan 18 '12 at 06:10

jaypal singh

1,592

I mean the last time a file was modified :) – Jan 18 '12 at 06:35
Sort result is ordered by folder and date. I want to sort by date and folder.. is it possible? – Jan 18 '12 at 06:59
Sorry, can you please show me some output? I didn't quite follow the sorting of folder if you used ls -lrt. – jaypal singh Jan 18 '12 at 07:11
//Jaypal Singh, I updated my output to my quiestion ↑ :). I really hope you understand it and sorry for my bad English. – Jan 18 '12 at 07:25
No worries, I have added an alternative. Hope that helps. – jaypal singh Jan 18 '12 at 07:33
Sorry, but it says 0652-017 -printf is not a valid option.. – Jan 18 '12 at 07:37
OS version is AIX 6.1. – Jan 18 '12 at 07:38
Looks like you don't have GNU find on your system. Try the new one. – jaypal singh Jan 18 '12 at 07:41
It perfectly works. I really appreciate your help.! – Jan 18 '12 at 07:47
I am glad it worked out. :) – jaypal singh Jan 18 '12 at 07:51
2

This fails if the file list is sufficiently long to force xargs to make multiple calls to ls, because then the files are only properly sorted within each ls invocation but lack a coherent global order in the output. – Brandon Rhodes Mar 04 '16 at 03:56
@BrandonRhodes How long does the list need to be for find to invoke ls multiple times? – Cameron Tacklind Jun 20 '21 at 23:09
It would depend on OS, on kernel parameters that set various buffer sizes, perhaps on buffer sizes compiled into find, and probably on how large the filenames were (as long filenames would fill the buffers first). I would expect that only experiments would let you set firm bounds for your OS. – Brandon Rhodes Jun 22 '21 at 00:43

Want to sort files by update date including sub-directories

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