Highlight the three last updated files in ls output

Question

Is there any way to overload or wrap the ls command so that it will highlight / underline / otherwise make obvious the last three modified files?

I know that I can simply ls -rtl to order by reverse modification time, but I usually do need an alphabetical list of files despite the fact that I would like to quickly identify the last file that myself or another dev modified.

Answer 1

The following seems to work for me

 grep --color -E -- "$(ls -rtl | tail -n3)|$" <(ls -l)

It uses grep with highlight on input ls -l and uses a regular expression to search for either of the inputs for the three oldest command. It also search for the end-of-line $ in order to print the whole file.

You can also put it in a function, such that you can use lll * with multiple arguments, just as you would use ls

function lll ()
{
    command grep --color -E -- "$(ls -rtl $@ | tail -n3)|$" <(ls -l $@)
}

Answer 2

It won't highlight the last three modified files (which I think is quite a difficult thing to achieve reliably), but ls++ might be enough for what you want. It highlights files by relative age, grouping by colour files that are seconds, hours, days or months old.

You can configure the colours to make the timescale you tend to work on more apparent (for active coding, hours vs days is the most important cross-over point for me).