Using LS To Show The Date Modified And A Specific Number Of Files

Question

I am using ls -t | head -8 to show the last 8 files modified in a directory, but this only prints the file name.

Is there a way to alter the above command so that it shows the modified date for the file names as well?

Answer 1

You'll want to use stat to get the file metadata:

stat -c $'%y\t%n' * | sort -n | head -8

Answer 2

stat is an easy way, but it can’t print the timestamp in a format like ls -l. If you want more fine-grained control over the format, use find with the -printf option instead, e.g. for an (almost) ls -l-like format:

find -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf "%T+#%Tb %Td %TH:%TM\t%p\n" | sort -rn | cut -d# -f2- | head -8

The %T+ is needed to sort the output properly and gets removed by cut aftwerwards. Read man find to find out more about thefind’s powerful -printf option.

Example run

$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-rw-r-- 1 dessert dessert 0 May 30 20:22 last week
-rw-rw-r-- 1 dessert dessert 0 Jun  6 17:22 today
-rw-rw-r-- 1 dessert dessert 0 Jun  5 17:22 yesterday
$ stat -c $'%y\t%n' * | sort -n
2018-05-30 20:22:29.919608691 +0200     last week
2018-06-05 17:22:10.207084356 +0200     yesterday
2018-06-06 17:22:01.940284127 +0200     today
$ find -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf "%T+#%Tb %Td %TH:%TM\t%p\n" | sort -rn | cut -d# -f2-
Jun 06 17:22    ./today
Jun 05 17:22    ./yesterday
May 30 20:22    ./last week
$ find -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf "%T+#%Tc\t%p\n" | sort -rn | cut -d# -f2-
Wed 06 Jun 2018 05:22:01 PM CEST        ./today
Tue 05 Jun 2018 05:22:10 PM CEST        ./yesterday
Wed 30 May 2018 08:22:29 PM CEST        ./last week
$ find -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf "%T+\t%p\n" | sort -rn
2018-06-06+17:22:01.9402841270  ./today
2018-06-05+17:22:10.2070843560  ./yesterday
2018-05-30+20:22:29.9196086910  ./last week

Answer 3

The ls command is not the most appropriate tool to use in this situation, as shown by other answers. There is a convoluted way to extract the information you want from the output of ls, though it does have limitations. It's quite a good example of how working with ls can quickly become complicated.

The specific issue with this chain of commands is that the use of the tr command removes any multiple occurrences of whitespace and replaces with a single whitespace. This will affect filenames, making them unsuitable for parsing by a machine. Parsing ls is a discouraged activity generally though.

ls -lrt| tail -4| tr -s ' '| cut -d ' ' -f6-| tac

The reverse ordering of ls results, with the -r option, is used to avoid the 'Total' line output by the -l option of ls, and tac is used at the end to reorder the results after trimming away the unwanted output.