Shell Programming and Scripting

@rbatte1
Unfortunately none of your scripts actually produce the correct result.
On my tests $var2 is always blank.

If you want time, skip the tail and the r of the ls!

Code:

ls -lt | (
 read x                 # if you have a header to discard, but read below
 while read x
 do
 . . .
 done
 )

No need for -1 on ls, that is automatic on stdout=pipe. No total to discard if you provide a file name list Daily*.

The problem with 'ls Daily_*' and sort is that they sort alpha-numeric binary, so for many files, Daily11 will be after Daily1, Daily2 will be between Daily199 and Daily20. That is why I used sed to spin off the number as a separate sort field, and used sort -n.

The order of find will probably be in directory order! A directory is just a pile of entry name strings and inode numbers in whatever order occurs due to creation, deletion, and further creation.

Code:

ls -t | head -1

@ctsgnb
Sorry for hijacking your thread for debate.


That may be true for a completely different filenames format.
The suffix here appears to be yyyymmdd which will come out in the chronological order with "ls" (which is why it is such a good choice of suffix).
(It doesn't work with American style yyyyddmm).
I can understand why he O/P has used a full pattern match too. We have very similar scripts for working in a central logs directory.

Sorry, cross-thread head leak!

Still, no need for -1 when there is a pipe.