Shell Programming and Scripting

I was thinking of putting something like this before the script:

Code:

find . -name "NRV*" -type d -maxdepth 1 -mtime -1 -exec "cd {}" \;

For some reason I can't get this to work right.
It echos correctly but won't perform the cd.

Every process in unix has it's own distinct working directory, the cd you are using in the above code will not change the working directory of the shell that ran the find command as the exec feature of find will run the cd command in a new sub shell.

You could use -print to output the sub-directory required and then use a cd command from within the shell it's self, something like this:

Code:

SUBDIR=$(find . -name "NRV*" -type d -maxdepth 1 -mtime -1 -print | head -1)
[ -n "$SUBDIR" ] && cd "$SUBDIR"

the [-n "$SUBDIR"] part is to test to ensure a directory was found before calling cd, and the head -1 is to select the first directory found when multiple match your find.

This doesn't work.
Oh, I see the problem. What I'm looking for is the newest directory, but I used -mtime 1 ... since it's Monday, the newest file is older than that.
Yep, using mtime -2 it works today, but it won't work tomorrow.

I hadn't thought about files older than a day. Is there a better way to specify the newest file?

OK, so you want to find the most recent modified directory with name "NRV*" under the current directory correct?

How about:

Code:

SUBDIR=$(ls -td NRV* | head -1)
[ -n "$SUBDIR" ] && cd "$SUBDIR"

If your looking for a directory at any depth you may need to do:

Code:

SUBDIR=$(find -L . -type d -name "NRV*" -printf '%T@ %p\n' | sort -nr | head -1 | cut -f2- -d" ")
[ -n "$SUBDIR" ] && cd "$SUBDIR"