why don't ls -lrt `find .` and find . -exec ls -lrt {} \+ produce the same output?

Question

I'm trying to sort files by date, including those that reside in subdirectories. I got it to work by using:

find . -exec ls -lrt {} \+

which I found somewhere on StackOverflow. My initial try was to use:

ls -lrt `find .`

but it doesn't work. It sorts the contents of each directory by date, rather than all of them together.

Why do these produce different output?

Answer 1

Use d option of ls.

ls -lrtd `find .`