thanks vidyasagar , treesloth and cfajohnson ..u guys are awesome and truly rockstars ..well treesloth i tried running ur script it gave me some errors here was one of the outputs frm ur script

"What directory do you want to check? /usr/bin/tail: cannot open `+2' for reading: No such file or directory"

the script looked like this
#!/bin/bash /(Changed from /bin/tcsh to /bin/bash)/
echo -n "What directory do you want to check? ";
set dir = $;

/bin/ls -alt $dir | /usr/bin/tail +2 | /usr/bin/head -n 1 ;

i edited the file and put the whole path of the ls tail and head commands .
and the output of command ls -lrt is

total 128
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4478 Sep 17 08:28 install.log.syslog
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 32645 Sep 17 08:28 install.log
-rw------- 1 root root 1232 Sep 17 08:28 anaconda-ks.cfg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 480 Sep 24 06:38 gvustudentsbatch1.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 78 Sep 26 07:32 a.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 66 Sep 26 07:37 b.txt
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 Oct 8 16:04 Desktop
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 8 16:25 tarun
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 8 16:26 a
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 81 Oct 8 18:44 latest.sh
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Oct 8 18:46 untitled folder
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 122 Oct 10 16:12 mod.sh
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 191 Oct 10 16:15 mod1.sh



cfajohnson i tried running ur script too ..it ran perfectly fine it solved first part of desired result which i wanted ...but the thing is .i ran your script , it was asking for a input from the user ...after that the script exited and returned nothing..as in the script ran it asked me to enter the name of the directory i wanted to find the modified files in ..then the output was blank
here is the output
[root@server1 ~]# ./mod1.sh /(i renamed the script as mod1.sh)/
Enter the directory you want to search in: /root /(i gave /root directory)/
[root@server1 ~]#