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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Find Oldest file in a directory tree Post 97502 by Perderabo on Tuesday 31st of January 2006 06:47:43 AM
Old 01-31-2006
Quote:
Originally Posted by blowtorch
Try this:
Code:
find <directory> -type f | xargs ls -ltr

Should sort all the files in the directory in order of oldest to newest.
Remember what xargs does for a living. If there are too many filenames to fit on one command line, xargs will construct as many command lines as needed to process them all. The set of filenames output by each commandline will be sorted by date. But the overall list of filenames will not be sorted. But in the special case where there are so few filenames that one command line is enough, this will work.
 

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HLS(1)							      General Commands Manual							    HLS(1)

NAME
hls - list files in an HFS directory SYNOPSIS
hls [options] [hfs-path ...] DESCRIPTION
hls lists files and directories contained in an HFS volume. If one or more arguments are given, each specified file or directory is shown; otherwise, the contents of the current working directory are shown. OPTIONS
-1 Output is formatted such that each entry appears on a single line. This is the default when stdout is not a terminal. -a All files and directories are shown, including "invisible" files, as would be perceived by the Macintosh Finder. Normally invisible files are omitted from directory listings. -b Special characters are displayed in an escaped backslash notation. Normally special or non-printable characters in filenames are replaced by a question mark (?). -c Sort and display entries by their creation date, rather than their modification date. -d List directory entries themselves rather than their contents. Normally the contents are shown for named directories on the command- line. -f Do not sort directory contents; list them in the order they appear in the directory. This option effectively enables -a and -U and disables -l, -s, and -t. -i Show the catalog IDs for each entry. Every file and directory on an HFS volume has a unique catalog ID. -l Display entries in long format. This format shows the entry type ("d" for directory or "f" for file), flags ("i" for invisible), file type and creator (four-character strings for files only), size (number of directory sub-contents or file resource and data bytes, respectively), date of last modification (or creation, with -c flag), and pathname. Macintosh "locked" files are indicated by "F" in place of "f". -m Display entries in a continuous format separated by commas. -q Replace special and non-printable characters in displayed filenames with question marks (?). This is the default when stdout is con- nected to a terminal. -r Sort entries in reverse order before displaying. -s Show the file size for each entry in 1K block units. The size includes blocks used for both data and resource forks. -t Sort and display entries by time. Normally files will be sorted by name. This option uses the last modification date to sort unless -c is also specified. -x Display entries in column format like -C, but sorted horizontally into rows rather than columns. -w width Format output lines suitable for display in the given width. Normally the width will be determined from your terminal, from the environment variable COLUMNS, or from a default value of 80. -C Display entries in column format with entries sorted vertically. This is the default output format when stdout is connected to a terminal. -F Cause certain output filenames to be followed by a single-character flag indicating the nature of the entry; directories are fol- lowed by a colon (:) and executable Macintosh applications are followed by an asterisk (*). -N Cause all filenames to be output verbatim without any escaping or question-mark substitution. -Q Cause all filenames to be enclosed within double-quotes (") and special/non-printable characters to be properly escaped. -R For each directory that is encountered in a listing, recursively descend into and display its contents. -S Sort and display entries by size. For files, the combined resource and data lengths are used to compute a file's size. -U Do not sort directory contents; list them in the order they appear in the directory. On HFS volumes, this is usually an alphabetical case-insensitive ordering, although there are some idiosyncrasies to the Macintosh implementation of ordering. This option does not affect -a, -l, or -s. SEE ALSO
hfsutils(1), hcd(1), hpwd(1), hdir(1), hcopy(1) FILES
$HOME/.hcwd AUTHOR
Robert Leslie <rob@mars.org> HFSUTILS
14-Jan-1997 HLS(1)
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