Find Oldest file in a directory tree


 
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# 8  
Old 01-27-2006
I think, I have found it. Not really confident though


$find . -name "*" -exec ls -lrt {} \; |sort -k8,8 -k6M,6M -k7,7n | grep '^-' | head -1

This gave me the oldest file in a particualr directory. Not sure, if this would work always.

Thanks All.
# 9  
Old 01-27-2006
I feel we should not sort based on the ls -lrt output because it contains the month in MMM format and not in number format, hence we can't sort...

here is small perl script... filedate.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
#Argument of directory name is required

open(PTR,"find $ARGV[0] |");

my $str;

while($str=<PTR>)
{
chomp $str;

my ($hr,$mn,$day,$mnth,$year)=(localtime((stat($str))[9]))[1,2,3,4,5];

$mnth+=1;
$year+=1900;

printf("$year%02d%02d%02d%02d $str\n",$mnth,$day,$hr,$mn);
}

close PTR;


save the above file and give executable permission...
after that

$filedate.pl <DIR NAME> | sort

you can sort according to ur requirement... filedate.pl will give you the date of file in yyyymmddhhmm format....
# 10  
Old 01-30-2006
I think the parameter
sort -k6M,6M

will sort the date month format as Jan, Feb, Mar,... in the ascending order. This what the man page says for the -M option. If that's not the case, please let me know.

I am using Sun Solaris 5.8

Thanks.
Rahul.

Last edited by rahulrathod; 01-30-2006 at 12:26 PM..
# 11  
Old 01-30-2006
The -M option is not not available for the find command on my AIX box

Jean-Pierre.
# 12  
Old 01-30-2006
Try this:
Code:
find <directory> -type f | xargs ls -ltr

Should sort all the files in the directory in order of oldest to newest.
# 13  
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.
# 14  
Old 01-31-2006
Id idn't get that. YOu mean to say if the search list is too long, the above won't work? I have a huge list of files to be searched in a specific partition which takes upto 47GB space. All this effort just to find the oldest file in this partition.

Please let me know if i interpreted it incorrectly.

Thanks.
Rahul.
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