How can I sort the output of 'ls' by last modified date?

Question

How can I sort the output of ls by last modified date?

Related (not necessarily a duplicate): Unix/Linux find and sort by date modified — Peter Mortensen, Dec 27 '16 at 14:15

score 2090 · Answer 1 · edited Oct 15 '23 at 05:10

2090

ls -t

or (for reverse, most recent at bottom):

ls -tr

The ls man page describes this in more details, and lists other options.

edited Oct 15 '23 at 05:10

End Anti-Semitic Hate

8,328

answered Apr 09 '09 at 13:20

Adnan

21,009

394

ls -halt is for human readable, show hidden, print details, sort by date. – Evgeni Sergeev Oct 01 '13 at 05:24
12

In case anyone's wondering, both the -t and -r arguments are specified in the section about ls in the POSIX standard, so should be compatible across Unices. – Mark Amery Oct 27 '15 at 12:09
11

ls -llt for showing date-timestamp along with sorting – Harshul Pandav Sep 26 '16 at 20:01
1

Is it possible to just show file name & date for each? – android developer Oct 14 '16 at 11:28
5

Yes it is possible – Ashraf.Shk786 Feb 20 '17 at 13:09
Note that this argument is also applicable to ll. – Epoc Mar 07 '17 at 14:20
16

@EvgeniSergeev DONT MEMORISE ls -halt a simple mistype may cause your server to crash! https://linux.die.net/man/8/halt – Isaac Jul 09 '17 at 21:43
1

@Isaac: for a regular user halt is not gonna work without sudo unless explicitly configured. – ccpizza Sep 02 '19 at 15:19
3

Yea, because nobody would ever run as root... – JPhi1618 Apr 21 '20 at 13:51
4

@Isaac if you mistype ls -halt you're still just running ls.... – éclairevoyant Jan 26 '22 at 18:57
2

Unless you mistype it as ls ;halt – Isaac Jan 26 '22 at 20:46
i prefer use ll -ltr , its would print in K for size of file instead of byte – Yogi Arif Widodo Oct 20 '22 at 21:18
@Isaac yeah and be very careful because you can also mistype it as sudo rm -rf / – bfontaine Feb 02 '24 at 16:27

score 186 · Answer 2 · edited Aug 30 '12 at 14:53

186

Try this: ls -ltr. It will give you the recent to the end of the list

edited Aug 30 '12 at 14:53

Eliran Malka

504

answered Apr 06 '10 at 14:44

hirana

1,961

I used this to get the list of files in my Git repository by their last edit date. ls -alt $(git ls-files -m) Thanks! – NobleUplift Aug 14 '19 at 22:07

score 56 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 15 '12 at 20:23

56

For a complete answer here is what I use: ls -lrth

Put this in your startup script /etc/bashrc and assign an alias like this: alias l='ls -lrth' Restart your terminal and you should be able to type l and see a long list of files.

answered Apr 15 '12 at 20:23

Ura

1,031

15

You can also call source /etc/bashrc if you want to add it to your repertoire while running. – cwallenpoole Feb 11 '15 at 07:57
1

You can also add it in ~/.bash_aliases just for your user (one can create the file if it doesn't exist already – Dinei Apr 24 '18 at 01:23

F. Hauri - Give Up GitHub · Answer 4 · 2024-02-03T11:21:49.060

40

I use sometime this:

find . -type f -mmin -5 -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/ls -tr

or

find . -type f -mmin -5 -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/ls -ltr

to look recursively for which files were modified in last 5 minutes.

... or now, with recent version of GNU find:

find . -type f -mmin -5 -exec ls -ltr {} +

... and even for not limiting to files:

find . -mmin -5 -exec ls -ltrd {} +

(note the -d switch to ls for not displaying content of directories)

More robust way?

Have a look at my answer to find and sort by date modified

edited Feb 03 '24 at 11:21

answered Jul 19 '13 at 11:01

F. Hauri - Give Up GitHub

1,883

By recursively you mean it lists all files in subdirectories, doesn't ls already have a switch to do that? – jiggunjer May 14 '15 at 16:28
@jiggunjer ls -Rltr will sort by dir, then by dates, find -type f -mmin -5 -exec ls -ltr {} + will just print files modified in last 5 minutes, sorted by date, regardless of directory tree! – F. Hauri - Give Up GitHub Dec 07 '16 at 18:08
Note that this won't work if the list of files is too long to be passed as one shell invocation to ls (https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/118200/27186) – then you'll see one sorted bunch of files, then another sorted bunch of files, etc. but the whole list won't be sorted. See https://superuser.com/questions/294161/unix-linux-find-and-sort-by-date-modified for sorting longer lists with find. – unhammer Sep 11 '19 at 07:21
@unhammer You're right, for this to work safely, see my recent anser to Unix/Linux find and sort by date modified – F. Hauri - Give Up GitHub Sep 11 '19 at 08:25

simhumileco · Answer 5 · 2018-10-18T05:00:53.247

Mnemonic

For don't ignore entries starting with . and sort by date (newest first):

ls -at

For don't ignore entries starting with . and reverse sort by date (oldest first):

ls -art

For don't ignore entries starting with ., use a long listing format and sort by date (newest first):

ls -alt

For print human readable sizes, don't ignore entries starting with ., use a long listing format and sort by date (newest first) (@EvgeniSergeev note):

ls -halt

but be careful with the last one, because a simple mistype can cause a server crash... (@Isaac note)

score 24 · Answer 6 · edited Apr 15 '12 at 19:30

24

Add:

alias lt='ls -Alhtr'

in $homedir/.bashrc

edited Apr 15 '12 at 19:30

slhck

228,104

answered Apr 15 '12 at 18:41

Layer8

241
2
2

score 18 · Answer 7 · edited Dec 27 '16 at 14:09

18

Find all files on the file system that were modified maximally 3 * 24 hours (3 days) ago till now:

find / -ctime 3

edited Dec 27 '16 at 14:09

Peter Mortensen

12,190

answered Nov 11 '13 at 16:11

pbies

2,907
3
23
25

score 15 · Answer 8 · answered Mar 06 '16 at 18:21

15

To show 10 most recent sorted by date, I use something like this:

ls -t ~/Downloads | head -10

or to show oldest

ls -tr ~/Downloads | tail -10

answered Mar 06 '16 at 18:21

random-forest-cat

353

1

it givls -t head -2 and ls -tr | tail -2 gives same result, option (-t/-tr) should be kept fixed and modified the tail/head or vice verse, modifing both is like modyfing nothing – DDS Jun 27 '18 at 16:09
1

Did you see the comment above? Indeed, one should use head in both commands (to change the sort order too), or use ls -t in both commands (which would always sort descending by date). – Arjan Feb 28 '20 at 11:15

score 10 · Answer 9 · edited Dec 27 '16 at 14:09

10

Using only very basic Unix commands:

ls -nl | sort -k 8,8n -k 6,6M

This worked on Linux; column 8 is "n" (numeric), column 6 is "M", month.

I'm new at sort, so this answer could probably be improved. Not to mention, it needs additional options to ls and sort to use exact timestamps, but not everyone will need this.

edited Dec 27 '16 at 14:09

Peter Mortensen

12,190

answered Jun 15 '14 at 21:47

bbarker

326

6

I suspect your answer hasn't gotten any up-votes because it parses the output of ls - see the canonical argument against doing so and this question about not parsing ls – Eponymous Dec 15 '14 at 22:32

score 6 · Answer 10 · answered Feb 28 '20 at 11:04

One possible way of showing for example last 10 modified files is following command:

ls -lrth | tail -n 10

Description of above command:

ls - list

arguments:

l - long
r - reverse
t - sort by time
h - human readable

then it's piped to tail command, which shows only 10 recent lines, defined by n parameter (number of lines)...

How can I sort the output of 'ls' by last modified date?

10 Answers10

I use sometime this:

More robust way?

Mnemonic

Linked