Finding the file created last

freeBatjko · #1 (**permalink**) 12-23-08, 09:28

Hi everyone,

I am trying to write a ksh script to automate a report.
Part of that must be to find a file the name of which follows a certain pattern,
which was the last one created (of all of those matching the pattern).

Example:

files in folder:

Code:

mama_dblog_grb_20081223.log
papa_dblog_grb_20081120.log
hans_dblog_grb_20081012.log
mama_dblog_grb_20070324.log
... etc

and i want to get the one that was created last, looking like "mama*.log", so i thought something like

Code:

ls -rt mama*.log

only filtered down to the one file that was created last of all of them...

I know it must be trivial for most, but I am fairly new in this shell game

mike_bike_kite · #2 (**permalink**) 12-23-08, 11:18

Try something like:

Code:

file=`ls -rt1 | tail -1`
echo "file is $file"

Your ls -rt command is fine but you really need to put one file per line to make it usefull so I used ls -rt1 in the above.
The tail -1 just keeps the last line.
The backticks are important as they run the commands before passing back the result to the variable file.
I don't have ksh on the machine infront of me but it should work.

Mike

freeBatjko · #3 (**permalink**) 12-24-08, 05:46

Thanks mike_bike_kite, works perfectly the way I wanted it to!

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