This might just be one command.

Any1 having the solution?

Thanks,
Rahul.

I think

ls -gt

i guess g is ignored by ls, the below one will work anyway

ls -1t|tail -1

1 lists the output of ls as a column
t sorts it by time
tail -1 lists the last item in the list

This will only give me the oldest file in the current directory.

What about searching the oldest file in the subdirectories?

Can we do it with find??

Try and adapt this ksh script :

#!/usr/bin/ksh
#
# Usage: $0 [directory]
#
oldest_file=

ls -1R ${1-} | \
awk -v dir="${1-}" '
        BEGIN {
           if (dir !~ /\/$/) 
              dir = dir "/"
           oldest_file_in_dir = 1;
        }
        /:$/ {
           dir = substr($0,1,length-1) "/";
           oldest_file_in_dir = 1;
           next;
        }
        oldest_file_in_dir {
           print dir  $0;
           oldest_file_in_dir = 0;
           next;
        }
    ' | \
while read file
do
   if [ -z "$oldest_file" ]
   then
      oldest_file="$file"
   else
      [[ "$file" -nt "$oldest_file" ]] && continue
      oldest_file="$file"
   fi
done

echo "Oldest File: $oldest_file"

I am trying to do something simpler as follows:

$find . -name "*" -exec ls -lrt {} \; |sort -k8 | more

But this gives me files in the ascending order of years

2003
2003
..
..
2004
..
..
2005

Now , I want to sort these further by month, day and time.

Any inputs??

I would use the following command (assuming I had GNU find available):

find $DIR -printf "%T@ %p\n" | sort -n | head -1

The %T is modification time in a custom format; @ is the format specifier for for "seconds since the epoch. The rest should be pretty self-evident. %C would be used if you cared about the "ctime" (the time at which the file's inode was changed in any way, including modifications to the file contents (as with mtime) but also changes to ownership, permissions, link count? etc.

A couple of heuristics for scripting in general:

Any time you're trying to find files with specific characteristics other than matching a simple glob pattern and any of the simple test features like -d (directory) or -r (readable), etc, you almost always want to use the find command. Most of the switches and arguments to find control what find will consider returning (to things like -print, -exec, or -ls).

Any time you're going to compare or manipulate timestamps under UNIX you probably want to use "seconds since the epoch" (this allows simple numeric operations such as sorting or arithmetic adjustment).

So it seems obvious to just traverse the tree printing all the timestamps in a usable form; sort numerically and discard all but the first line. (You could also sort -nr, reversed, and take the last line with tail -1; but then your tail process has to read the entire pipe. In this example the head command can exit and break the pipe to kill to output from the sort command; which is marginally more efficient. Of course all of the expense in this is in the sort command ... it will take most of the CPU time and memory. Meanwhile, of course the find command will expend I/O -- that's inherent in traversing a filesystem tree).

P.S. If you need to convert a "seconds since the epoch" timestamp into a form you can read you can use an expression like:

date --date "$(( $(date +%s) - $TIMESTAMP )) seconds ago"

.. and naturally you can also specify any format you like for that output as you would with any other date


JimD (former Linux Gazette AnswerGuy)