Unix: Directory listing including last modified time

Question

I have a directory tree with lots of branches and trees. At the top node, however, there are only five directories, let's say A-E. Within the directory tree, files are being updated at random.

I'd like to be able to get a listing of the directories (i.e. like a ls) with a last modified file time which includes all sub directories and files within that directory. So I will end up with something like this:

A 12th June 08:00
B 13th June 08:00
C 14th June 08:00
D 15th June 08:00
E 16th June 08:00

I've tried variants on ls -t, but that does not seem to take account of sub-directories.

There's also something like this find . -type f | xargs ls -tr, but I can't see a way of getting the output I want using this (note: I'm very limited in my unix knowledge, as you can probably tell)

Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

This might be what you're looking for:

#!/bin/bash
for dir in A B C D E
do
    file=$dir
    while [[ -n $file ]]
    do
        prev=$file
        file=$(find $dir -newer $file -type f -print -quit)
    done
    mod=$(stat --format=%Y "$prev")
    echo "$dir $(date --date=@$mod '+%d %b %T')"
done

Answer 2

Have you tried using ls -clRt? Recursive, and sorting by last modified time.