Linux show files by date

How do I do a ls and then sort the results by date created?

In what order are the dated ordered by? Certainly not alphanumeric order. ls -lt sorts by modification time. But I need creation time.

There does seem to be a way to get the file creation time in Linux if the file is on a ext4 file system. See: unix.stackexchange.com/a/131347/182996

7 Answers 7

Most unices do not have a concept of file creation time. You can’t make ls print it because the information is not recorded. If you need creation time, use a version control system: define creation time as the check-in time.

If your unix variant has a creation time, look at its documentation. For example, on Mac OS X (the only example I know of), use ls -tU . Windows also stores a creation time, but it’s not always exposed to ports of unix utilities, for example Cygwin ls doesn’t have an option to show it. The stat utility can show the creation time, called “birth time” in GNU utilities, so under Cygwin you can show files sorted by birth time with stat -c ‘%W %n’ * | sort -k1n .

Note that the ctime ( ls -lc ) is not the file creation time, it’s the inode change time. The inode change time is updated whenever anything about the file changes (contents or metadata) except that the ctime isn’t updated when the file is merely read (even if the atime is updated). In particular, the ctime is always more recent than the mtime (file content modification time) unless the mtime has been explicitly set to a date in the future.

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How to Sort Output of ‘ls’ Command By Last Modified Date and Time

One of the commonest things a Linux user will always do on the command line is listing the contents of a directory. As we may already know, ls and dir are the two commands available on Linux for listing directory content, with the former being more popular and in most cases, preferred by users.

When listing directory contents, the results can be sorted based on several criteria such as alphabetical order of filenames, modification time, access time, version and file size. Sorting using each of these file properties can be enabled by using a specific flag.

In this brief ls command guide, we will look at how to sort the output of ls command by last modification time (date and time).

Let us start by executing some basic ls commands.

Linux Basic ls Commands

1. Running ls command without appending any argument will list current working directory contents.

2. To list contents of any directory, for example /etc directory use:

3. A directory always contains a few hidden files (at least two), therefore, to show all files in a directory, use the -a or —all flag:

4. You can as well print detailed information about each file in the ls output, such as the file permissions, number of links, owner’s name and group owner, file size, time of last modification and the file/directory name.

This is activated by the -l option, which means a long listing format as in the next screenshot:

Sort Files Based on Time and Date

5. To list files in a directory and sort them last modified date and time, make use of the -t option as in the command below:

6. If you want a reverse sorting files based on date and time, you can use the -r option to work like so:

We will end here for now, however, there is more usage information and options in the ls command, so make it a point to look through it or any other guides offering ls command tricks every Linux user should know or use sort command. Last but not least, you can reach us via the feedback section below.

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How do I find a recent file by date created?

However, because app is such a generic name, many results show up. I would like to find a directory named app, which was created today. Is there a flag or command to achieve this?

*nix file systems don’t record the file creation/birth time and GNU find(1) doesn’t offer to search by birth time. That’s why all answers are and will be about (status) modification time.

@ThomasWeller: The manual says, “ -ctime n : File’s status was last changed […]” (emphasis added). Nothing about file creation time.

@DavidFoerster: thanks. So we have -mtime for modified and -ctime for changed. That sounds really great and absolutely not confusing. Well, not your fault.

@ThomasWeller: Yeah, having -smtime or something alike for file status modification time would be more intuitive.

4 Answers 4

To search the whole filesystem ( / ) for

• directories ( -type d ),
• called app ( -name app ),
• that were modified more recently than one day (i.e., 24 hours) ago ( -mtime 0 ),

find / -name app -type d -mtime 0 

In particular see the explanation of the -mtime flag and the » find $HOME -mtime 0 » example:

[T]o match -mtime 0, a file will have to have a modification in the past which is less than 24 hours ago.

(Thus the time in days since the file was modified is rounded down to the nearest integer for purposes of being matched by -mtime .)

Creation is considered a form of modification for the purpose of file timestamps, so this will work even if the file’s contents weren’t altered after it was created. It will also match folders with modification timestamps in the last day that were created earlier, but you probably don’t have many such folders whose exact name is app .

When a file was created is not typically stored in the filesystem. But the time at which its metadata were last changed (e.g., name/location, ownership, permissions) is stored. If you prefer to go by that to when the file’s contents were modified, use -ctime in place of -mtime :

find / -name app -type d -ctime 0 

For both -mtime and -ctime , the original creation of the file qualifies as a modification / status change.

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How do I find all the files that were created today in Unix/Linux?

On my Fedora 10 system, with findutils-4.4.0-1.fc10.i386 :

find -daystart -ctime 0 -print 

The -daystart flag tells it to calculate from the start of today instead of from 24 hours ago.

Note however that this will actually list files created or modified in the last day. find has no options that look at the true creation date of the file.

That is almost perfect for me, clean and concise, just missing the «-f» flag to get only files (without current dir)

(@ephemient: Well, with *nix, the ctime of an inode was colloquially known as the creation time, even if the specification said (inode) change time (keeping neither changes to file names nor contents, but meta data like ownership, permissions,…. sleuthkit on «MAC» meaning))

find . -mtime -1 -type f -print 

Don’t use backticks; don’t use pwd except for printing (that’s the p in pwd ) the working directory. Use . to reference current directory.

this answer is incorrect — this displays the files created in the last 24 hours, not the files created today

@G.Lebret -ctime is the time the file’s status was last changed. Unix doesn’t store file creation time, last modified time is obviously equivalent to creation time if nothing modified the file after it was created.

To find all files that are modified today only (since start of day only, i.e. 12 am), in current directory and its sub-directories:

touch -t `date +%m%d0000` /tmp/$$ find . -type f -newer /tmp/$$ rm /tmp/$$ 

I use this with some frequency:

$ ls -altrh --time-style=+%D | grep $(date +%D) 

After going through many posts I found the best one that really works

find $file_path -type f -name "*.txt" -mtime -1 -printf "%f\n" 

This prints only the file name like abc.txt not the /path/tofolder/abc.txt

Also also play around or customize with -mtime -1

This worked for me. Lists the files created on May 30 in the current directory.

Use ls or find to have all the files that were created today.

Using ls : ls -ltr | grep «$(date ‘+%b %e’)»

Using find : cd $YOUR_DIRECTORY ; find . -ls 2>/dev/null| grep «$(date ‘+%b %e’)»

 find ./ -maxdepth 1 -type f -execdir basename '<>' ';' | grep `date +'%Y%m%d'` 

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You can use find and ls to accomplish with this:

find . -type f -exec ls -l <> \; | egrep "Aug 26"; 

It will find all files in this directory, display useful informations ( -l ) and filter the lines with some date you want. It may be a little bit slow, but still useful in some cases.

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