Question

I have some folders and files inside a directory. I need to order only the folders by creation time.

How order all folders by creation time using shellscript?
Thanks

Answer 1

You don’t need a shell script. ls will order your files by creation time if you include the -ltc options.

From man ls:

-c     with -lt: sort by, and show, ctime (time of last modification of file 
                  status information) 
       with -l: show ctime and sort by name otherwise: sort by ctime

If you are only interested in directories and not regular files, you can filter the results by piping to grep

ls -ltc | grep ^d

Note: ^d means show only lines that start with the letter d which in the case of the output of ls -l means a directories.

update

From your answer, it looks like you’re only interested in the filename of the newest file. Try this:

ls -ltc | awk '/^d/{print $NF; exit}'

Notes:

• /^d/ : filter lines starting with ‘d’
• print $NF : print the last column
• ; exit : exit immediately after the first match