Find newest file. Multiple Filetype restrictions

Question

I want to write a command that gives me the newest file in a directory recursively. But that's not my only limitation. The files has to be an mp3 or a jpg file. (case insensitive prefered) I only need the creating date of that newest file. If possible I want it formatted like this: 30-12-2014 (so: day-month-year)

This is currently wath I've got:

find .  -name '*.mp3' -or -name '*.JPG'   -printf "%TD \n" | sort -rn | head -n 1

But it doesn't work well. I only get JPG's and the date isn't formatted.

Answer 1

Something like this should work:

find . \( -iname "*.mp3" -o -iname "*.jpg" \) -printf '%TY%Tm%Td %TT %p\n' | sort -r

This should find the files that (case-insensitively) find files ending with mp3 or jpg, print out the modification time, then sort it in reverse order.

It seems to show both file-types when you run it effectively as two commands:

( find . -iname "*.mp3" -printf '%TY%Tm%Td %TT %p\n' ; find . -iname "*.jpg" -printf '%TY%Tm%Td %TT %p\n' ) | sort -r

Answer 2

With zsh:

setopt extendedglob
zmodload zsh/stat
zstat -F %F +mtime -- **/(#i)*.(mp3|jpg)(Om[1])

Note that it's based on last modification time, the creation time (whatever that means) is generally not readily available on Linux.

It doesn't consider hidden files. I you want them, add the D globbing qualifier above.

Answer 3

Also see the following:

find . -type f -mtime -1 \( -name '*.mp3' -o -name '*.jpg' \) -printf '%AY-%Am-%Ad %P \n'

Answer 4

You specified -or, that needs to be -o, as other have corrected. You also need parentheses I think (correction on my original post). I'd recommend using %T@ for the format specifier (seconds since 1970) which is cleaner to sort; then you can convert it using

date --date="@`find . \\( -iname "*.mp3" -o -iname "*.jpg" \\) -printf '%T@\n' | sort -rn | head -n1`" 

or whatever. You can also put in whatever date format you want using +.