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Find Oldest file in a directory tree

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# 1  
Old 01-25-2006
Find Oldest file in a directory tree
This might just be one command.

Any1 having the solution?

Thanks,
Rahul.
# 2  
Old 01-25-2006
Quote:
Originally Posted by rahulrathod
This might just be one command.

Any1 having the solution?

Thanks,
Rahul.
I think
Code:
ls -gt

would be one way of doing it. This will give a shortened version of the long list with the oldest files being listed in the end of the list. This should list them by the timestamp in descending order.
# 3  
Old 01-25-2006
i guess g is ignored by ls, the below one will work anyway

ls -1t|tail -1

1 lists the output of ls as a column
t sorts it by time
tail -1 lists the last item in the list
This User Gave Thanks to linuxpenguin For This Post:
jrymer
# 4  
Old 01-27-2006
This will only give me the oldest file in the current directory.

What about searching the oldest file in the subdirectories?

Can we do it with find??
Last edited by rahulrathod; 01-27-2006 at 05:56 AM..
# 5  
Old 01-27-2006
Try and adapt this ksh script :

Code:
#!/usr/bin/ksh
#
# Usage: $0 [directory]
#
oldest_file=

ls -1R ${1-} | \
awk -v dir="${1-}" '
        BEGIN {
           if (dir !~ /\/$/) 
              dir = dir "/"
           oldest_file_in_dir = 1;
        }
        /:$/ {
           dir = substr($0,1,length-1) "/";
           oldest_file_in_dir = 1;
           next;
        }
        oldest_file_in_dir {
           print dir  $0;
           oldest_file_in_dir = 0;
           next;
        }
    ' | \
while read file
do
   if [ -z "$oldest_file" ]
   then
      oldest_file="$file"
   else
      [[ "$file" -nt "$oldest_file" ]] && continue
      oldest_file="$file"
   fi
done

echo "Oldest File: $oldest_file"

Jean-Pierre.
# 6  
Old 01-27-2006
I am trying to do something simpler as follows:

$find . -name "*" -exec ls -lrt {} \; |sort -k8 | more

But this gives me files in the ascending order of years

2003
2003
..
..
2004
..
..
2005

Now , I want to sort these further by month, day and time.

Any inputs??
# 7  
Old 01-27-2006
deleted... sorry
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