How to list files sorted by modification date recursively (no stat command available!)

Question

How can I get the list of all files under current directory along with their modification date and sorted by that date?

Now I know how to achieve that with find, stat and sort, but for some weird reason the stat is not installed on the box and it's unlikely that I can get it installed.

Any other option?

PS: gcc is not installed either

Answer 1

My shortest method uses zsh:

print -rl -- **/*(.Om)

(add the D glob qualifiers if you also want to list the hidden files or the files in hidden directories).

If you have GNU find, make it print the file modification times and sort by that. I assume there are no newlines in file names.

find . -type f -printf '%T@ %p\n' | sort -k 1 -n | sed 's/^[^ ]* //'

If you have Perl (again, assuming no newlines in file names):

find . -type f -print |
perl -l -ne '
    $_{$_} = -M;  # store file age (mtime - now)
    END {
        $,="\n";
        print sort {$_{$b} <=> $_{$a}} keys %_;  # print by decreasing age
    }'

If you have Python (again, assuming no newlines in file names):

find . -type f -print |
python -c 'import os, sys; times = {}
for f in sys.stdin.readlines(): f = f[0:-1]; times[f] = os.stat(f).st_mtime
for f in sorted(times.iterkeys(), key=lambda f:times[f]): print f'

If you have SSH access to that server, mount the directory over sshfs on a better-equipped machine:

mkdir mnt
sshfs server:/path/to/directory mnt
zsh -c 'cd mnt && print -rl **/*(.Om)'
fusermount -u mnt

With only POSIX tools, it's a lot more complicated, because there's no good way to find the modification time of a file. The only standard way to retrieve a file's times is ls, and the output format is locale-dependent and hard to parse.

If you can write to the files, and you only care about regular files, and there are no newlines in file names, here's a horrible kludge: create hard links to all the files in a single directory, and sort them by modification time.

set -ef                       # disable globbing
IFS='
'                             # split $(foo) only at newlines
set -- $(find . -type f)      # set positional arguments to the file names
mkdir links.tmp
cd links.tmp
i=0 list=
for f; do                     # hard link the files to links.tmp/0, links.tmp/1, …
  ln "../$f" $i
  i=$(($i+1))
done
set +f
for f in $(ls -t [0-9]*); do  # for each file, in reverse mtime order:
  eval 'list="${'$i'}         # prepend the file name to $list
$list"'
done
printf %s "$list"             # print the output
rm -f [0-9]*                  # clean up
cd ..
rmdir links.tmp

Answer 2

Assuming GNU find:

find . -printf '%T@ %c %p\n' | sort -k 1n,1 -k 7 | cut -d' ' -f2-

Change 1n,1 to 1nr,1 if you want the files listed most recent first.

If you don't have GNU find it becomes more difficult because ls's timestamp format varies so much (recently modified files have a different style of timestamp, for example).

Answer 3

On a mac there is no -printf argument to find, but you can do this instead:

find . -print0 | xargs -0 -n 100 stat -f"%m %Sm %N" | sort -n|awk '{$1="";print}'

Answer 4

Ignoring hidden files — with nice & fast time stamp

Handles spaces in filenames well — not that you should use those!

$ find . -type f -not -path '*/\.*' -printf '%TY.%Tm.%Td %THh%TM %Ta %p\n' |sort -nr |head -n 10

2017.01.25 18h23 Wed ./indenting/Shifting blocks visually.mht
2016.12.11 12h33 Sun ./tabs/Converting tabs to spaces.mht
2016.12.02 01h46 Fri ./advocacy/2016.Vim or Emacs - Which text editor do you prefer?.mht
2016.11.09 17h05 Wed ./Word count - Vim Tips Wiki.mht

More find galore can be found by following the link.

Answer 5

Speaking generally of finding files by date (this won't work for the original poster, but I ended up here so I thought others might as well). In my use case I want to list the files for the purpose of reviewing them before deletion.

With findutils 4.6.0 I like:

find . -type f -mtime +270 -exec ls -laFGht --time-style=iso {} \+

The above command finds files (-type f), in the current working directory (.) that were modified more than 270 days ago (-mtime +270 Also -mtime 0 will produce the last 24 hours, and -mtime -5 shows the last 5 days). It then uses ls to list them by date, newest first (-exec ls -laFGht --time-style=iso {} \+)

Here's a sample of the output:

-rwxrwx---+ 1 user1 208M 2018-07-16  ./filename.bak*
-rwxrwx---+ 1 user1  702 2018-07-15  ./filename.ldf*
-rwxrwx---+ 1 user1 208M 2018-07-15  ./filename.bak*

The great thing about this is that once the list has been reviewed, its a simple matter to replace the list part with the find delete command:

find . -type f -mtime +270 -delete