Question

I found and tweaked this script to find the most recently modified file in a directory recursively. It only breaks when there is a space in the directory name. Can anyone help me adjust the script so it will read directories with space also?s

for i in *; do

find $i -type f | perl -ne 'chomp(@files = <>); my $p = 9; foreach my $f (sort { (stat($a))[$p] <=> (stat($b))[$p] } @files) { print scalar localtime((stat($f))[$p]), "\t", $f, "\n" }' | tail -1

done

Answer 1

Quoting fixes everything.

find "$i" -type f

Also, you don’t need tail. Just swap $a and $b and exit after you print.

find $i -type f | perl -lne 'chomp(@files = <>); my $p = 9; foreach my $f (sort { (stat($b))[$p] <=> (stat($a))[$p] } @files) { print scalar localtime((stat($f))[$p]), "\t", $f; exit }'

And -l (letter “ell”) appends newlines for you when printing.

Edit:

Actually there’s no need for a loop at all:

find  -type f | perl -lne 'chomp(@files = <>); my $p = 9; @files = sort { (stat($b))[$p] <=> (stat($a))[$p] } @files; print scalar localtime((stat($files[0]))[$p]), "\t", $files[0]'