Question

I’m using bash.

Suppose I have a log file directory /var/myprogram/logs/.

Under this directory I have many sub-directories and sub-sub-directories that include different types of log files from my program.

I’d like to find the three newest files (modified most recently), whose name starts with 2010, under /var/myprogram/logs/, regardless of sub-directory and copy them to my home directory.

Here’s what I would do manually
1. Go through each directory and do ls -lt 2010*
to see which files starting with 2010 are modified most recently.
2. Once I go through all directories, I’d know which three files are the newest. So I copy them manually to my home directory.

This is pretty tedious, so I wondered if maybe I could somehow pipe some commands together to do this in one step, preferably without using shell scripts?

I’ve been looking into find, ls, head, and awk that I might be able to use but haven’t figured the right way to glue them together.

Let me know if I need to clarify. Thanks.

Answer 1

Here’s how you can do it:

 find -type f -name '2010*' -printf "%C@\t%P\n" |sort -r -k1,1 |head -3 |cut -f 2-

This outputs a list of files prefixed by their last change time, sorts them based on that value, takes the top 3 and removes the timestamp.