Assuming time is a complete unknown, how about:

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Ah! grail's idea is what we were looking for methinks. WAY cleaner. And to make it print only the directory:

Hi GrapefruiTgirl,

thanks for the script.
but the script still relies on commands find -ctime and ls -rtl which leaves the problem intact..

I ran your script. it is not working for the situation where there are nested sub-directories.

Thanks,
Kamal

Hi All,

Thanks for all your inputs.
based on GrapefruiTgirl's script, I found a simple workaround for my problem.

find . -type f | xargs ls -rtl

The above command lists all files in all nested sub-directories with timed order (latest modified file being at end of list).
Based on the command output, we can see what is latest modified file which tells us the directory path also.

I think this solution works fine. what say?
(but still this command is not sorting files in order in some cases where the time format changes. ex: very old files are displayed with time like "Aug 30 2009" and for this year files "Aug 30 01:25")

Thanks,
Kamal

I dunno, something's amiss. When I try your latest command, and grail's command, and my script, I get three different results, and grail's method looks to be the (most?) correct result. I'd do some more examining of your output if I were you.

It's fairly obvious that the script I provided is way too convoluted to work with, when compared to the possible alternates, so have a closer look at your results from the other methods..

Are you really sure about the 'old files' issue?
I don't have any files old enough to test, but although the basic ls cmd may show(!) dates in different formats for old files, when using

ls -ltr

ls is still reading the dir inode (which is where ctime/mtime/atime for the files are stored) and I'm (pretty) sure it's not stored differently dependent on age.

I don't have a known working solution for this yet. But I just now confirmed (as best I can) that no method given yet in this thread, is working as desired. Seems it shouldn't be that complicated..

I made an infinite loop that writes to a file every 5 seconds forever. And using all methods given so far in this thread, none produce the file/directory that I'm writing to.

Update:

It seems my test file and my window manager's logfile are both competing to be the last-modified file! Knowing that, I change what I wrote above in post #22:

My script still seems to work (convoluted as it is), as does grail's one-liner. And similarly to grail's one-liner, I got this:
from here: http://mediakey.dk/~cc/linux-howto-f...s-recursively/
and it also seems to work. All 3 methods consistently produce either one of my testfile or my window manager's logfile.

What say the OP? Have you concluded that one of these methods is indeed producing accurate results for you?

Hi Celine,

perfect!!! It's working..
Thanks a lot for the info.

But I do have large very databases and it is taking hell lot of time to scan all files in all directories and sorting..

Is there another method to find the directory with latest modified content without scanning the files..?

Thanks,
Kamal

Well you could change it to look for directories instead so the number to be scanned would be less. Simply change -f to -d for type

Hi Grail,

Thanks for the good suggestion. This will serve my purpose because whenever a file is modified it's directory's timestamp also gets updated.

I'm marking this thread as SOLVED. once again thanks a lot to all for the help.

Thanks,
Kamal

inotify ?.