How do I do a ls and then sort the results by date created?

Question

In what order are the dated ordered by? Certainly not alphanumeric order.

ls -lt sorts by modification time. But I need creation time.

Answer 1

Most unices do not have a concept of file creation time. You can't make ls print it because the information is not recorded. If you need creation time, use a version control system: define creation time as the check-in time.

If your unix variant has a creation time, look at its documentation. For example, on Mac OS X (the only example I know of), use ls -tU. Windows also stores a creation time, but it's not always exposed to ports of unix utilities, for example Cygwin ls doesn't have an option to show it. The stat utility can show the creation time, called “birth time” in GNU utilities, so under Cygwin you can show files sorted by birth time with stat -c '%W %n' * | sort -k1n.

Note that the ctime (ls -lc) is not the file creation time, it's the inode change time. The inode change time is updated whenever anything about the file changes (contents or metadata) except that the ctime isn't updated when the file is merely read (even if the atime is updated). In particular, the ctime is always more recent than the mtime (file content modification time) unless the mtime has been explicitly set to a date in the future.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, the stat(2) API does not provide a way to get the file creation time, as it is not required by the Unix standards.

However, some filesystems (as ext4 or XFS), do save this information within the file metadatas. There is just no standard way to get it, but there is a way:

Note: this answer mainly covers Linux systems.

UPDATE 2021: the new ls command option

According to Stéphane Chazelas, the ls version from coreutils 8.32 (and glibc 2.28, and kernel 4.11) is now capable of using the new statx(2) system call (see end of this answer) to extract the creation time metadata.

So to list files sorted by creation/birth date/time, you can use:

ls -lt --time=birth

The -t option will sort by the type of time indicated with the --time option (I suspect birth can be changed by creation if preferred).

Add -r to reverse the sort order.

debugfs for extN filesystems

debugfs -R 'stat partition/relative/path/to/file' /dev/sda1

You would get something like that mentioning crtime (not ctime!) if you use ext4.

 ctime: 0x513a50e5:d4e448f0 -- Fri Mar  8 21:58:13 2013
 atime: 0x513dd8f1:04df0b20 -- Mon Mar 11 14:15:29 2013
 mtime: 0x513a50e5:d4e448f0 -- Fri Mar  8 21:58:13 2013
crtime: 0x513a259a:35191a3c -- Fri Mar  8 18:53:30 2013

This command may take some time to return, probably because it also lists every extent related to the file.

Use a VCS?

Now if you want to order files by creation date, I guess this is not easily (nor properly) possible. As Gilles says, it would probably be easier if you'd use a version control system. But you may try to have a look at the ext4 API...

The stat command (2021 updated)

I tried the stat -c '%w' myfile command on a ext4 filesytem on a (recent enough) Ubuntu system without success (it just answers -).

UPDATE 2021: according to Thomas Nyman, the above command works on Linux if you have at least coreutils 8.31, glibc 2.28 & kernel 4.11. That does not sort files by itself though you could try:

stat -c '%w %n' * | sort -n 

to achieve that. Use %W if you don't care about human readable date. Add -r option to sort to reverse order.

---

UPDATE 2020: since Linux kernel 4.11, a new statx(2) system call has been introduced. Its API can give access to file creation time, if the info is available on the filesystem. To my knowledge, there is no standard/stable userspace utility allowing us to get this info yet, but it will probably appear in some time. This is not a standard POSIX interface though, but a Linux specific, says the man:

statx() was added to Linux in kernel 4.11; library support was added in glibc 2.28.

statx() is Linux-specific.

Answer 3

On Linux systems running kernel 4.11 or later, with glibc 2.28 or later, and coreutils 8.31 or later, stat can show a file’s birth time on file systems which store it. Output similar to that of ls -l can be obtained with

stat -c "%A %4h %U %G %10s %.16w %n" -- *

and sorted output (assuming no filename with newline characters) with

stat -c "%.10W %A %4h %U %G %10s %.16w %n" -- * |
  sort -k1,1n |
  cut -d' ' -f2-

With coreutils 8.32 or later, ls can display and sort using the birth time, using the --time=birth option:

ls -l --time=birth

The stat invocations above use these formatting options:

• %.10W: the birth time, in seconds since the Unix epoch (with a 10 digit fractional part).
• %A: the file type and permissions, in ls -l format
• %4h: the number of hard links to the file, aligned to four characters
• %U: the owning user’s name
• %G: the owning group’s name
• %10s: the file size, aligned to ten characters
• %.16w: the birth time, in human-readable format, truncated to sixteen characters (enough to show the year, month, day, hour, minute and second)
• %n: the file’s name

Answer 4

[Edit]
Use this command ls -lct to sort files as per ctime (time of last modification of file status information).

Answer 5

Here's a Perl script which uses Totor's answer to achieve what you want (if your filesystem is ext4).

Works on my home machine (Ubuntu) and my server (CentOS), but not tested beyond that, so ymmv.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use Modern::Perl '2009';

use DateTime;


# Open the current directory for reading
opendir my $dh, "." or die "Unable to open directory: $!";

# Create a hash to save results into
my %results;
my %datestamp;

# Loop through the directory getting creation date stats for each file
while ( my $filename = readdir $dh ) {
    # Skip non-files
    next if $filename eq '.' or $filename eq '..';

    # Save the ls output for this file/directory
    $results{ $filename } = `ls -ld $filename`;

    my $stats = `debugfs -R 'stat $filename' /dev/sda6 2>/dev/null`;
    # crtime: 0x51cd731c:926999ec -- Fri Jun 28 12:27:24 2013
    $stats =~ m/crtime\: \w+\:\w+ -- (.+?)\n/s;
    my $datestring = $1;

    # Dissect date with a regexp, ick
    my %months = (
        'Jan' => '1',
        'Feb' => '2',
        'Mar' => '3',
        'Apr' => '4',
        'May' => '5',
        'Jun' => '6',
        'Jul' => '7',
        'Aug' => '8',
        'Sep' => '9',
        'Oct' => '10',
        'Nov' => '11',
        'Dec' => '12',
    );
    $datestring =~ m/\w+ (\w+)  ?(\d+) (\d\d)\:(\d\d)\:(\d\d) (\d\d\d\d)/;

    # Convert date into a more useful format
    my $dt = DateTime->new(
        year   => $6,
        month  => $months{$1},
        day    => $2,
        hour   => $3,
        minute => $4,
        second => $5,
    );

    # Save the datestamp for this result
    $datestamp{ $filename } = $dt->iso8601;
}

# Output in date order
my @filenames = sort { $datestamp{$a} gt $datestamp{$b} } keys %datestamp;

foreach my $filename ( @filenames ) {
    print $results{ $filename };
}

Answer 6

To do it in shell. ls do not provide creation time but change time. Only debugfs can show creation time if partition is ext4

disk=$(df -Th . | grep ext4  |awk '{print $1}')
for file in "."/*
do
    inode=$(ls -i $file | awk '{print $1}')
    crtime=$(debugfs -R "stat <$inode>" $disk 2>/dev/null | grep crtime |  awk -F'-- ' '{print $2}' | awk '{print $2,$3,$5,$4}')

    printf "$crtime\t$file\n"
done | sort -k4 | sort -n -k 3 -k 1M -k2 -k4

Answer 7

In case you want to find it in GUI, not in CLI:
In Ubuntu 21.04, I can install KDE Dolphin File Manager, and see " Created" column in that file manager interface.