Question

I’m writing a deployment script that saves timestamped backup files to a backups directory. I’d like to do a rollback implementation that would roll back to the most recent file.

My backups directory:

$:ls

.              1341094065_public_html_bu  1341094788_public_html_bu
..             1341094390_public_html_bu
1341093920_public_html_bu  1341094555_public_html_bu

I want to identify the most recent file (by timestamp in the filename) in the backup directory, and save its name to a variable, then cp it to ../public_html, and so on…

Answer 1

The latest-timestamped filename should sort last alphabetically. So you can then use tail -n1 to extract it.