How can I find the last 10 modified files

Question

I'm in the root folder and need to find the last 10 modified files of just this folder. Every time I put -mtime like my lecturer said I get 10 days. I need the last 10 modified files, not the last 10 days worth. I have tried find -my time, my time piped with tail. I get a long list of every modified file of the last 10 days. I need just the last 10 modified files of the root directory.

Answer 1

In zsh, for the 10 regular files in the current working directory or below that were last modified the most recently:

ls -ldt -- **/*(D.om[1,10])

In other shells, but assuming you're on a recent GNU system:

find . -type f -printf '%T@:%P\0' |
  LC_ALL=C sort -zrn |
  LC_ALL=C sed -z 's/^[^:]*://;10q' |
  xargs -r0 ls -ltd --

If you don't want to consider files in subdirectories, remove the **/ in zsh or add -maxdepth 1 to find after ..

To exclude hidden files, remove the D glob qualifier in zsh, or change the find line to:

LC_ALL=C find . -name '.?*' -prune -o -type f -printf '%T@:%P\0' |

Or if also excluding files in subdirectories:

LC_ALL=C find . -maxdepth 1 ! -name '.*' -type f -printf '%T@:%P\0' |

Those make no assumption on what characters or non-characters the file paths may contain.

Answer 2

ls -t | head should work, as long as the filenames don't include newlines.

ls -t sorts by time, with newest files first. head only keeps the top 10 lines.

If you want more details, you can use ls -lt, but that prepends an extra line with the total size, so you need ls -lt | head -n 11.

If you want to include hidden files, you can use ls -At | head. (ls -A, or --almost-all for GNU ls, includes hidden files except for . and ...)

Note that this gives you the most recent 10 files of any type, including directories, not just regular files.