On Wed, Oct 09, 2019 at 02:15:44AM +1100, Andrew McGlashan wrote:
On 8/10/19 9:33 am, Craig Sanders via luv-main wrote:
Either with 'find ... -exec' or, if you need to process find's list of filenames (with grep or sed or something) make sure you use NUL separated output and tools that can handle NUL-separated input (e.g. 'find ... -print0 | grep -z ... | head -z -n 10 | xargs -0r')
find badly needs an option for sorting the output via timestamps.
Yes, that would be useful. Not essential, though, as there are other ways to do it.
Want the last version of a file: ls -rt|tail -1
How do you do that with find?
Similar to how you'd do it with stat: with a printf format string. i.e. use find's -printf option to output the file's change time (in seconds since the epoch), a TAB, the filename, and a NUL separator. find /path/ -type f -printf '%C@\t%p\0' | sort -z -k1,1 -r -n | head -z -n 1 | cut -z -f2 | sort is then used to sort find's output by timestamp (reverse numeric sort), then head to get only the first match, and cut to get rid of the no-longer-needed timestamp. or you could pipe it into awk or perl or whatever instead of any or all of the sort, head, and/or cut commands. see "man find" and search for printf for other file data that can be printed. BTW, you could then pipe the output of the above pipeline into xargs to do something with the filename(s) matched. e.g. to move the matching file to another directory: xargs -0r mv -T /destination/ Unlike ls, this will not break if any filename contains newlines or other annoying but valid characters. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>