in linux terminal, how do I show the folder's last modification date, taking its content into consideration?
So here's the deal. Let's say I have a directory named "web", so
$ ls -la
drwx------ 4 rimmer rimmer 4096 2010-11-18 06:02 web
BUT inside this directory, web/php/
$ ls -la
-rw-r--r-- 1 rimmer rimmer 1957 2011-01-05 08:44 index.php
That means that even though the content of my directory, /web/php/index.php has been last modified at 2011-01-05, the /web/ directory itself is reported as last modified at 2010-11-18.
What I need to do is have my /web/ directory's last modification date reported as the latest modification date of any file/directory inside this directory, recursively.
How do I go about doing this?
Something like:
find /path/ -type f -exec stat \{} --printf="%y\n" \; |
sort -n -r |
head -n 1
Explanation:
- the find command will print modification time for every file recursively ignoring directories (according to the comment by IQAndreas you can't rely on the folders timestamps)
- sort -n (numerically) -r (reverse)
- head -n 1: get the first entry
If you have a version of find (such as GNU find) that supports -printf then there's no need to call stat repeatedly:
find /some/dir -printf "%T+\n" | sort -nr | head -n 1
or
find /some/dir -printf "%TY-%Tm-%Td %TT\n" | sort -nr | head -n 1
If you don't need recursion, though:
stat --printf="%y\n" *
If I could, I would vote for the answer by Paulo. I tested it and understood the concept. I can confirm it works.
The find command can output many parameters.
For example, add the following to the --printf clause:
%a for attributes in the octal format
%n for the file name including a complete path
Example:
find Desktop/ -exec stat \{} --printf="%y %n\n" \; | sort -n -r | head -1
2011-02-14 22:57:39.000000000 +0100 Desktop/new file
Let me raise this question as well: Does the author of this question want to solve his problem using Bash or PHP? That should be specified.
It seems to me that simply: ls -lt mydirectory does the job...