UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi Folks,
As part of my application I need to find out what the latest directory based
on the name of that directory (not it's file system timestamp).
Example: I have a directory which contains below directories (each of while contains files etc)
20120000/
20120000/
latest (symbolic link to 20120000)
So in this case the latest directory is latest and 20120000
If a new directory called 20130000 gets created here then that would be the latest directory.
If another new directory called 20090000 gets created then that would NOT be the latest directory
Is there a handy way (using grep / awk / find etc) to check the latest based on the "yyyymmdd" pattern
of the directory name.
Any advice would be great
Thanks - Ro

Code:

ls | sort -r | grep -v latest | head -1

Would a simple sort suffice?

Code:

ls -1|sort -n|tail -1

I hope that this helps. If not, then I'm not understanding what you actually want. Please elaborate, with listings if you have any.



Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK

---------- Post updated at 03:20 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:19 PM ----------

In fact, if you are looking for the highest number, then just

Code:

ls -1|tail -1

should work.

I think we need to stop ls finding the directory called "latest".

Code:

ls -1d ????0000 | tail -1

Hey Folks,

Cheers, the below worked a treat for me:

ls | sort -r | grep -v latest | head -1

Thanks!

Ronan

May be, you want to put the result into a variable:
lastdirectory=`ls | sort -r | grep -v latest | head -1`
echo $lastdirectory