How to find the latest file in a directory

Suppose if you hava a directory with a huge set of files(more than 500) in a log directory, you would want to find the latest file in the directory. Now we can see few ways to that.

for example, Let us take the below scenario

$ ls -lrt total 476744 -rw-r--r-- 1 sittik sdefault 13764 Aug 20 06:34 cache_log.23219.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 sittik sdefault 95451 Aug 20 06:38 cache_log.23236.txt ... ... -rw-r--r-- 1 sittik sdefault 96269 Sep 30 11:59 cache_log.23233.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 sittik sdefault 91236 Sep 30 12:03 cache_log.23239.txt drwxr-xr-x 2 sittik sdefault 4096 Sep 30 12:04 old


1) Now our goal is to print the last field of the last line (except the dir old) from the "ls -lrt" output in that directory.

$ ls -lrt | awk '/cache_log/ { f=$NF };END{ print f }' cache_log.23239.txt


So basically to print the last field of last line(in this case the last field of last line of "ls -lrt" command), we can use the below command.

$ ls -lrt | awk '{ f=$NF }; END{ print f }'


2) This can also be acheived by using Head command.

$ ls -t1 | head -n1


3) This can also be acheived by using Find command.

$ find . -not -type d -printf "%T+ %p\n" | sort -n | tail -1