How to get the relative paths with ls?

Question

I'd like to do something like this to move the last two downloaded files:

mv ` ls -rt ~/Downloads/ | tail -2 ` .

Unfortunately, ls only gives the filenames. How can I adapt the code above?

(Before someone points it out, I'm aware of the problems in piping the output of ls. I'd only use this when I know the filenames in question.)

Answer 1

Okay, so if you won't give up on ls, then at least try to get out of the habit of using backticks for everything, especially when xargs is a better fit:

ls -rtd ~/Downloads/* | tail -n2 | xargs -I{} mv {} .

Answer 2

You can use GNU find there :

mv $(find ~/Download -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -printf '%Ts %p\n' | sort -n | cut -d ' ' -f2- | tail -n 2) .

The find -printf options :

• %Ts to display the time as epoch
• %p the file path

See man find | less +/'^ *-printf'

edit

if you need to deal with spaces in file-names, I recommend this another solution :

find -maxdepth 1 -printf '%Ts %p\n' |
    sort -n |
    cut -d ' ' -f2- |
    tail -n 2 |
    xargs -i% mv % .

Answer 3

With zsh:

mv ~/Downloads/*(.om[1,2]) .

The (...) part are called globbing qualifiers, one of the killer features of zsh. Each qualifier (usually single characters) allows to filter the matched entries based on attributes of the files (type, size, time...), alter the order in which they are expanded, or modify how they are expanded.

Above, we've got:

• . (dot): select regular files only (not directories, symlinks...)
• om: order the list by modification time.
• [1,2]: select only the first two entries.

Also note that the command will fail if there's no match (where other shells could accidentally move the wrong file/dir).

Answer 4

Use ls -rt ~/Downloads/*instead of ls -rt ~/Downloads/. In ls -rt ~/Downloads/* the argument string is first expanded by the shell (this is called filename globbing). So you get a list of paths as arguments for the ls -rt command, which then sorts it in the way you specify by the options of ls. In contrast, the command ls -rt ~/Downloads/ reads the content of the directory ~/Downloads/. This is a list of files without the directory path.