In Linux Terminal, How to Show the Folder's Last Modification Date, Taking Its Content into Consideration

in linux terminal, how do I show the folder's last modification date, taking its content into consideration?

Something like:

find /path/ -type f -exec stat \{} --printf="%y\n" \; | 
     sort -n -r | 
     head -n 1

Explanation:

• the find command will print modification time for every file recursively ignoring directories (according to the comment by IQAndreas you can't rely on the folders timestamps)
• sort -n (numerically) -r (reverse)
• head -n 1: get the first entry

Directory last modified date

The mtime (modification time) on the directory itself changes when a file or a subdirectory is added, removed or renamed.

Modifying the contents of a file within the directory does not change the directory itself, nor does updating the modified times of a file or a subdirectory. Additionally, adding, removing or renaming files/directories in subdirectories does not propagate up to the directory. If you change the permissions on the directory, the ctime changes but the mtime does not.

Get folder (or sub-files/folders) last modification date and time

Solution:

find . -exec stat -f "%m" \{} \; | sort -n -r | head -1

Explanation:

1. the find command traverses the current directory (.) and for each file encountered executes (-exec) the command stat -f "%m". stat -f "%m" prints the last modification unix timestamp of the file.
2. sort -n -r sorts the output of the find command numerically (-n) in reverse order (-r). This will list the latest modification timestamp first.
3. head -1 then extracts the first line of the output from sort. This is the latest modification unix timestamp of all the files.

How can I list (ls) the 5 last modified files in a directory?

Try using head or tail. If you want the 5 most-recently modified files:

ls -1t | head -5

The -1 (that's a one) says one file per line and the head says take the first 5 entries.

If you want the last 5 try

ls -1t | tail -5

Print a file's last modified date in Bash

You can use the
stat
command

stat -c %y "$entry"

More info

%y   time of last modification, human-readable

Get most recent file in a directory on Linux

ls -Art | tail -n 1

This will return the latest modified file or directory. Not very elegant, but it works.

Used flags:

-A list all files except . and ..

-r reverse order while sorting

-t sort by time, newest first

How to recursively find the latest modified file in a directory?

find . -type f -printf '%T@ %p\n' \
| sort -n | tail -1 | cut -f2- -d" "

For a huge tree, it might be hard for sort to keep everything in memory.

%T@ gives you the modification time like a unix timestamp, sort -n sorts numerically, tail -1 takes the last line (highest timestamp), cut -f2 -d" " cuts away the first field (the timestamp) from the output.

Edit: Just as -printf is probably GNU-only, ajreals usage of stat -c is too. Although it is possible to do the same on BSD, the options for formatting is different (-f "%m %N" it would seem)

And I missed the part of plural; if you want more then the latest file, just bump up the tail argument.

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