I want to make a shell script which will create or update a symlink (named "current") so that it automatically points to the subdirectory with the most recent date.

For example, given these subdirectories:

2009.03.21_00.50.02
2009.03.21_11.31.42
2009.03.22_07.55.47
2009.03.22_10.59.20
2009.04.03_23.21.38
2009.04.15_11.06.08
2009.04.16_00.50.02
2009.04.18_20.35.26

I want the script to create or update a symlink like this:
current -> 2009.04.18_20.35.26/

the symlink will reside at the same level as the directories 2009.04.18_20.35.26, etc.

When the script is run next, if there is a new directory named e.g., 2009.04.20_16.15.06, (and this is the most recent) the symlink should be updated to:
current -> 2009.04.20_16.15.06/

I have no idea how to do this. Any suggestions? Thanks.

How do the new dirs get created? Wouldn't it be cleaner to have
the process creating them update the link?


Cheers,
Tink

Might 'ls -tr' not fail if the directory doesn't only contain recently created subdirectories? I'm thinking 'find /some/dir -maxdepth 1 -type d -printf "%A@ %p\n" | \sort -r|head -1|awk '{print "ln -sf",$2,"current"}'|sh' though that's prolly too convoluted and not -print0 resisant.

It might if the resolution gets too small, or if the dirs get written
to after after creation.

Thinking about it again: if those dirs are the ONLY content
of that particular directory, and considering that their names
are pretty much ISO normalised (punctuation aside) an
$(ls | tail -n 1 )
should suffice ;}

Thanks for the great suggestions. This helps a lot.

It would be nice if it will work if I happen to stick a readme file or some other misc files in the parent folder. Mostly the directories are the only content, but that might not always be true.

However, the directory names will always conform exactly to the pattern I have shown.

I don't guess ls will show only directories... at least the man page doesn't seem to show such an option.

I tried this out from the parent directory. Here's what I did:

find ./ -maxdepth 1 -type d -printf "%A@ %p\n" | \sort -r|head -1
1240101326.0000000000 ./2009.04.18_20.35.26

Is that what you expected?

Is the $2 selecting the second value ("./2009.04.18_20.35.26")?

Thanks.

Yes, unfortunately, I do not have that option. Another (sophisticated) program creates the directories.

A little more experimenting got me this:

I hope you guys don't consider this spam. But I do understand what it is doing now. It is very cool!

No, there isn't. You could either use find for this (as
unspawn suggested [I wouldn't actually bother with the timestamps]),
or be specific in the criteria for ls ... e.g.
ls 200?.??.??_??.??.??
(of course, this again only works if only dirs follow that naming convention).



Cheers,
Tink