How to list files recursively and sort them by modification time?

Question

How do I list all files under a directory recursively and sort the output by modification time?

I normally use ls -lhtc but it doesn't find all files recursively. I am using Linux and Mac.

ls -l on Mac OS X can give

-rw-r--r--    1 fsr  user      1928 Mar  1  2011 foo.c
-rwx------    1 fsr  user      3509 Feb 25 14:34 bar.c

where the date part isn't consistent or aligned, so a solution have to take this into account.

Partial solution

stat -f "%m%t%Sm %N" ./* | sort -rn | head -3 | cut -f2-

works, but not recursively.

Answer 1

Here is a method using stat as @johnshen64 suggested

find . -type f -exec stat -f "%m%t%Sm %N" '{}' \; | sort -rn | head -20 | cut -f2-

Answer 2

Use find's -printf and sort on a reasonable date format:

find -type f -printf '%T+\t%p\n' | sort -n

This should minimize process forks and thus be the fastest.

Examples if you don't like the fractional second part (which is often not implemented in the file system anyway):

find -type f -printf '%T+\t%p\n' | sed 's/\.[[:digit:]]\{10\}//' | sort -n
find -type f -printf '%T+\t%p\n' | cut --complement -c 20-30 | sort -n

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EDIT: Standard find on Mac does not have -printf. But it is not difficult to install GNU find on Mac (also see that link for more caveats concerning Mac/Linux compatibility and xargs).

Answer 3

find . should be able to get all the files. Something like this:

find . -exec ls -dl '{}' \; | sort -k 6,7

You need to tune it for you needs.

Answer 4

This answer to a similar question on the Unix Stack Exchange site helped me because I was using zsh:

How to list files sorted by modification date recursively (no stat command available!)

Answer 5

On my Linux, it required a small tweak using stat because of coreutils:

find . -type f -exec stat -c "%y %N" "{}" \;

To find the most recent 20 files, sort reverse order by modification time:

find . -type f -exec stat -c "%y %N" "{}" \; | sort -rn | head -20 | cut -f2-

From stat (manual) docs:

%y - Time of last modification
%Y - Time of last modification as seconds since Epoch
%n - File name
%N - Quoted file name with dereference if symbolic link