Get most recent file in a directory on Linux

Looking for a command that will return the single most recent file in a directory.

Not seeing a limit parameter to ls...

ls -Art | tail -n 1

Not very elegant, but it works.

Used flags:

-A list all files except . and ..

-r reverse order while sorting

-t sort by time, newest first

ls -t | head -n1

This command actually gives the latest modified file in the current working directory.

This is a recursive version (i.e. it finds the most recently updated file in a certain directory or any of its subdirectory)

find /dir/path -type f -printf "%T@ %p\n" | sort -n | cut -d' ' -f 2- | tail -n 1

Brief layman explanation of command line:

• find /dir/path -type f finds all the files in the directory
  • -printf "%T@ %p\n" prints a line for each file where %T@ is the float seconds since 1970 epoch and %p is the filename path and \n is the new line character
  • for more info see man find
• | is a shell pipe (see man bash section on Pipelines)
• sort -n means to sort on the first column and to treat the token as numerical instead of lexicographic (see man sort)
• cut -d' ' -f 2- means to split each line using the character and then to print all tokens starting at the second token (see man cut)
  • NOTE: -f 2 would print only the second token
• tail -n 1 means to print the last line (see man tail)

A note about reliability:

Since the newline character is as valid as any in a file name, any solution that relies on lines like the head/tail based ones are flawed.

With GNU ls, another option is to use the --quoting-style=shell-always option and a bash array:

eval "files=($(ls -t --quoting-style=shell-always))"
((${#files[@]} > 0)) && printf '%s\n' "${files[0]}"

(add the -A option to ls if you also want to consider hidden files).

If you want to limit to regular files (disregard directories, fifos, devices, symlinks, sockets...), you'd need to resort to GNU find.

With bash 4.4 or newer (for readarray -d) and GNU coreutils 8.25 or newer (for cut -z):

readarray -t -d '' files < <(
  LC_ALL=C find . -maxdepth 1 -type f ! -name '.*' -printf '%T@/%f\0' |
  sort -rzn | cut -zd/ -f2)

((${#files[@]} > 0)) && printf '%s\n' "${files[0]}"

Or recursively:

readarray -t -d '' files < <(
  LC_ALL=C find . -name . -o -name '.*' -prune -o -type f -printf '%T@%p\0' |
  sort -rzn | cut -zd/ -f2-)

Best here would be to use zsh and its glob qualifiers instead of bash to avoid all this hassle:

Newest regular file in the current directory:

printf '%s\n' *(.om[1])

Including hidden ones:

printf '%s\n' *(D.om[1])

Second newest:

printf '%s\n' *(.om[2])

Check file age after symlink resolution:

printf '%s\n' *(-.om[1])

Recursively:

printf '%s\n' **/*(.om[1])

Also, with the completion system (compinit and co) enabled, Ctrl+Xm becomes a completer that expands to the newest file.

So:

vi Ctrl+Xm

Would make you edit the newest file (you also get a chance to see which it before you press Return).

vi Alt+2Ctrl+Xm

For the second-newest file.

vi *.cCtrl+Xm

for the newest c file.

vi *(.)Ctrl+Xm

for the newest regular file (not directory, nor fifo/device...), and so on.