I'm writing a script to find the oldest file in a directory. I know this can be done by using ls -rt | tail -1 but these are rather large directories and that can be somewhat slow since the script will be running constantly.

Are there any other ways to do this that would be faster? I looked to see if find would have any options but I didn't see anything. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Joel

awk can also make it.
in the portion of scripts below I look fore some core* archive files and delete the oldest:

ls -r core* | awk '{ fname=$1 } END{ system("rm " fname) }'

I think that find is better that ls command.

example to find archives with more that 10 days and delete them :

find /directore -mtime +10 -type f -exec rm {} \;

or

find / -mtime +10 -name "core" -type f -exec rm {} \;

or another option with ls command :

ls -r core* | xargs rm

Witt