Listing recent files

boughtonp · 02-27-2020, 10:46 AM

A large amount of my ls use is for recent files/directories - either created same day, or within the past week. I figured I'd create a couple of aliases so I don't keep getting a screenful when I only want a handful.

The perfect solution would be if I could simply splice the -newer option from find into the ls command (retaining all of ls's functionality), but failing that I've been looking at other ways to achieve this.

To rule out the likely question: why not use -ls option to find? e.g. find -maxdepth 1 -newermt "7 days ago" -ls
The -ls option gives equivalent to "ls -dils" but I want "ls -Flptr --color" by default, plus the ability to use other functionality of ls as and when required, which isn't available with that method.

After a bunch of fiddling, I came up with this - it adds a tab-delimited timestamp before the actual time definition, which awk can filter/compare against a passed in timestamp, and then remove before printing the line:

Code:

alias lsweek="f(){ ls -Flptr --color --quoting-style=shell-escape --time-style='+%t%F%t%a %e %b %H:%M' \"\$@\" | awk -v lastweek=\$(date -d '7 days ago' +'%F') -F \$'\t' 'BEGIN{OFS=\"\"}{ if (lastweek<=\$2){\$2=\"\";print} }' ;};f "

I needed to add --quoting-style=shell-escape to ensure any filenames with newlines don't get misreported.

Here's a non-alias version of the same thing, with escaped line-breaks added for readability:

Code:

f(){
ls -Flptr --color --quoting-style=shell-escape --time-style='+%t%F%t%a %e %b %H:%M' "$@" \
| awk -v lastweek=$(date -d '7 days ago' +'%F') -F $'\t' \
  'BEGIN{OFS=""}{ if (lastweek<=$2){$2="";print} }'
};f

Two downsides:
* It requires output in long listing format to work.
* Colours needs to be manually turned off if sending to a file/etc.

Neither of those are major problems, but would still be nice to have fixes/workarounds.

Or point out if I've missed anything?

Maybe there's another less hacky way to achieve this?

hazel · 02-27-2020, 10:56 AM

Couldn't you use find with a pipe to the ls command you want rather than using find's built-in ls options?

boughtonp · 02-27-2020, 11:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hazel

Couldn't you use find with a pipe to the ls command you want rather than using find's built-in ls options?

You mean like this?

Code:

find -maxdepth 1 -newermt "7 days ago" | ls -Flptr

That just lists the full directory instead of the found files. (Not sure why - I'm sure I've done some variant of that before.)

This partially worked:

Code:

ls -Flptr $(find -maxdepth 1 -newermt "7 days ago")

But using it on a subdir includes the subdir name in the output, (and there were other problems with it).

I also tried passing ls into -exec which had similar issues to that.

pan64 · 02-27-2020, 12:11 PM

find has a -ls switch too.
Also you can simply:

Code:

ls -lt <whatever> | awk ' filter on the (last X) day of the first entry '

Turbocapitalist · 02-27-2020, 12:11 PM

It could be something more like this:

Code:

find . -type f -print0 | sort --zero-terminated | xargs --null ls -lth

Or if you have GNU find then

Code:

find . -maxdepth 1 -newermt "7 days ago" -printf '%CY%Cm%Cd\t%M\t%s\t%p\n'

ehartman · 02-27-2020, 12:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by boughtonp

You mean like this?

Code:

find -maxdepth 1 -newermt "7 days ago" | ls -Flptr

You have to use the "xargs" command in FRONT of the ls to let it pick up the filenames found by the find command. So something like

Code:

find ...|xargs ls -Flptr

and have to experiment how to strip the directory from the found filenames.
Should be something with "basename" but at the moment I don't see how to put xargs on both commands. Maybe use a script and run THAT through xargs.

boughtonp · 02-27-2020, 05:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ehartman

You have to use the "xargs" command in FRONT of the ls to let it pick up the filenames found by the find command.

Thanks, xargs is a command I always seem to forget about.

So...

Code:

find -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -newermt "7 days ago" -print0 | xargs -0 ls -Flptr -color=auto

That makes colours automatic and allows any ls format, but has directory name included - if I strip it out before ls (e.g. using sed -z), it wont find the files - unless I do pushd/popd to temporarily switch to directory and then it's just removing ./ so ls still finds the file...

Code:

pushd subdir >/dev/null ; \
find -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -newermt "7 days ago" -print0 \
  | sed -zE "s/(^'?)\.\//\1/" \
  | xargs -0 ls -Flptr --color=auto ; \
popd >/dev/null

Making that work for "lsweek subdir/*.txt" would require some logic to split it so the path goes to pushd and the filter is added to find - should be fairly simple, but I'll worry about that another time.