Question

Given a directory i’m looking for a bash one-liner to get a recursive list of all files with their size and modified time tab separated for easy parsing. Something like:

cows/betsy       145700    2011-03-02 08:27
horses/silver    109895    2011-06-04 17:43

Answer 1

You can use stat(1) to get the information you want, if you don’t want the full ls -l output, and you can use find(1) to get a recursive directory listing. Combining them into one line, you could do this:

# Find all regular files under the current directory and print out their
# filenames, sizes, and last modified times
find . -type f -exec stat -f '%N %z %Sm' '{}' +

If you want to make the output more parseable, you can use %m instead of %Sm to get the last modified time as a time_t instead of as a human-readable date.