Finding recent files with ls and 'FlAt'

A quick way to find recently changed files is to pass the -FlAt flags to ls.

Combined with head, this command can give you a quick overview of recently modified files in a directory. The -F option distinguishes certain types of files and directories by adding extra characters (such as '/' for directories, '*' for executables, etc.). The -t option sorts the entries by the date they were last modified. Piping the output to head shows (by default) only 10 entries.

Code Listing 1

# ls -FlAt | head

For more information, see man ls.

From http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20040628-newsletter.xml