Most recent files linux

How to Find Recent or Today’s Modified Files in Linux

In this article, we will explain two, simple command line tips that enable you to only list all today’s files.

One of the common problems Linux users encounter on the command line is locating files with a particular name, it can be much easier when you actually know the filename.

However, assuming that you have forgotten the name of a file that you created (in your home folder which contains hundreds of files) at an earlier time during the day and yet you need to use urgently.

Below are different ways of only listing all files that you created or modified (directly or indirectly) today.

1. Using the ls command, you can only list today’s files in your home folder as follows, where:

1. -a – list all files including hidden files
2. -l – enables long listing format
3. —time-style=FORMAT – shows time in the specified FORMAT
4. +%D – show/use date in %m/%d/%y format

Find Recent Files in Linux

In addition, you can sort the resultant list alphabetically by including the -X flag:

You can also list based on size (largest first) using the -S flag:

2. Again, it is possible to use the find command which is practically more flexible and offers plenty of options than ls, for the same purpose as below.

1. -maxdepth level is used to specify the level (in terms of sub-directories) below the starting point (current directory in this case) to which the search operation will be carried out.
2. -newerXY , this works if timestamp X of the file in question is newer than timestamp Y of the file reference. X and Y represent any of the letters below:
   1. a – access time of the file reference
   2. B – birth time of the file reference
   3. c – inode status change time of reference
   4. m – modification time of the file reference
   5. t – reference is interpreted directly as a time

This means that, only files modified on 2016-12-06 will be considered:

Find Today’s Files in Linux

Important: Use the correct date format as reference in the find command above, once you use a wrong format, you will get an error as the one below:

Alternatively, use the correct formats below:

Find Todays Modified Files in Linux

You can get more usage information for ls and find commands in our following series of articles on same.

In this article, we explained two important tips of how to list only today’s files with the help of ls and find commands. Make use of the feedback form below to send us any question(s) or comments about the topic. You can as well inform us of any commands used for the same goal.

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How To Find Largest Top 10 Files and Directories On Linux / UNIX / BSD

How to find out top 10 files and directories on Linux or Unix

There is no simple command available to find out the largest files/directories on a Linux/UNIX/BSD filesystem. However, combination of following three commands (using pipes) you can easily find out list of largest files:

Tutorial details
Difficulty level	Easy
Root privileges	Yes
Requirements	Linux and Unix-like OS
Est. reading time	3 minutes

Steps to find Largest Directories in Linux

1. du command : Estimate file space usage.
2. sort command : Sort lines of text files or given input data.
3. head command : Output the first part of files i.e. to display first 10 largest file.
4. find command : Search file.

How to find out top Directories and files in Linux

Type the following command at the shell prompt to find out top 10 largest file/directories:
# du -a /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10
Sample outputs:

If you want more human readable output try (works with GNU/Linux du version/user only):
$ cd /path/to/some/where
$ du -hsx * | sort -rh | head -10
$ du -hsx — * | sort -rh | head -10
Where,

• du command -h option : display sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K, 234M, 2G).
• du command -s option : show only a total for each argument (summary).
• du command -x option : skip directories on different file systems.
• sort command -r option : reverse the result of comparisons.
• sort command -h option : compare human readable numbers. This is GNU sort specific option only.
• head command -10 OR -n 10 option : show the first 10 lines.

The above command will only work of GNU/sort is installed. Other Unix like operating system should use the following version (see comments below):

Find the largest file in a directory and its subdirectories using the find command

Type the following GNU/find command:

You can skip directories and only display files, type:

Hunt down disk space hogs with ducks

Let us find out top directories and files using disk space in Linux or Unix with help of the following bash shell alias:

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Run it as follows to get top 10 files/dirs eating your disk space:
$ ducks
Sample outputs:

Fig.01 Finding the largest files/directories on a Linux or Unix-like system

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Category	List of Unix and Linux commands
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Comments on this entry are closed.

Great, but what if I only want the largest files and not the directories?

To find out largest file only use command ls as follows in current directory:
ls -lSh . | head -5
Output:
-rw-r–r– 1 vivek vivek 267M 2004-08-04 15:37 WindowsXP-KB835935-SP2-ENU.exe
-rw-r–r– 1 vivek vivek 96M 2005-12-30 14:03 VMware-workstation-5.5.1-19175.tar.gz
ls -lSh /bin | head -5
You can also use find command but not du:
find /var -type f -ls | sort -k 7 -r -n | head -10

Hope this helps

And yes to find the smallest files use command:
ls -lSr /var

Or use find command with -size flag.
find / -type f -size +20000k -exec ls -lh <> ; | awk ‘< print $8 “: ” $5 >’

Read man page of find for more info.

“find / -type f -size +20000k -exec ls -lh <> ; | awk ‘< print $8 “: ” $5 >’”

needs to have the exec altered

find / -type f -size +20000k -exec ls -lh <> \; | awk ‘< print $8 “: ” $5 >’

Also, I find this output easier to read

find . -type f -size +20000k -exec ls -lh <> \; | awk ‘’

How do I can list all the files in several directories and at the end write the totat of all the files and directories.I’m using the du command as fallow:
du -sh /public/base/sites/F*/*20070115*

this command give me the size of all the files but not the global total.

can somebody help me. please write me. john_fernandez@verizon.com.do

“If you want more human readable output try:

# du -ha /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10”

Im pretty sure that this will put 999kb above 1gb so I don’t think that this works.

This does not work.

# du -ha /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10″

as Joe says this ignores files over 1gb

You could try this, gives a human readable output in MB

find . -type f | xargs ls -s | sort -rn | awk ‘‘ | head

Human readable version:

for X in $(du -s * | sort -nr | cut -f 2); do du -hs $X ; done

If you set du to human readable I think it will not sort the way you really want.

For the above problems. I would like to find a way to list only the last level directories’ sizes.

(I want to filter somehow this:
/home
/home/user
/home/user/mail

I just want to see the lasts of the tree!)

this is what i use.

for i in G M K; do du -ah | grep 2$i | sort -nr -k 1; done | head -n 11

Worked like charm

find . -type f -print0| xargs -0 ls -s | sort -rn | awk ‘’ | head

! -print0 for filenames with spaces …
(and xargs -0 combined)

No wonder windows rule

Yeah you just go ahead and wait the 3 hours this search would take on Windows.

How about the 3 hours it takes to read through a bunch of unexplained programming nonsense. I swear half of the time all Linux guys do is insult other users….Example, the first listing is great as it begins to explain what the flags do, but I have no idea were to put some of them, pipes are not explained…ect

This is why Winblows users should not try and use Linux, they are very unintelligent and lack the ability to look up simple things.

Fast forwarda few years, Linux won, bro 🙂

“Late last week, hell had apparently frozen over with the news that Microsoft had developed a Linux distribution of its own. The work was done as part of the company’s Azure cloud platform, which uses Linux-based network switches as part of its software-defined networking infrastructure.” — SOURCE HERE.

Winfan, I read this page wondering how to do these things in Windows — can you post instructions? Thanks!

This may vary depending on the version of Windows you’re using, but the basic procedure is: open the find/search window, go to the advanced options, and there will be an option there to enter in a size parameter. Simple.

In XP, press F3 or go Start->Search. Choose “All files and folders”, then “More advanced options”, then “What size is it?”, then specify a size.

I believe beez was being sarcastic towards Winfan as was his right after Winfans brainless comment. Most Linux distro GUI’s come with search function just like Windows GUI.

Now just try to do the search on command line on Windows (server)…

@winfan… how do you do this in windows? you don’t 😛

c:\>dir /S /O-S | more

The simple dir /S command from c:\ will give you all files and directories from c:\ all the way through the drive and will sort from largest to smallest running through each directory. You can filter using /A if you’d like to restrict by hidden, system, archive files, read only files etc. and passing the output to another windows command if you need to further restrict or search in the files for something like “show me all the files on my hard drive over 6MB that contain the word ‘log’ from largest to smallest.”

/O will Specify the sort order for the files with the S after it sorting by file size (smallest first) putting the – in front of the S reverses the order.

| more – you’re a unix dude, you should know what this means…

But if someone is doing some cleanup through their harddrive, this is the simple command I’d start with.

Just a note about the cockyness or us Unix admins (as I happen to be one now)
Not everyone that uses windows started using it with a mouse kid. Also not everyone who prefers windows is not cross-platform… We were running 64 bit clustered NT boxes on RISC processors at Digital Equipment Corporation with failover and failback in 1996 brother. Don’t believe me? Find a really old copy of Windows NT ver 3.51 open it and you’ll see two folders NT and Alpha.

The Department of Veterans Affairs had no problems with ever needing to reboot a “lousy unreliable windows box” because the Intel platform itself was the problem, not windows. We ran Alpha on 64 bit RISC processors and it was just as reliable as any Unix box or Mainframe we had. I had a Jensen Alpha running an exchange server for 5 years, and we only rebooted it every 6 months for giggles…

Windows machines are made to be used by the masses which means more dumbasses can kinda run one. A good Admin is a good Admin, no matter what platform. Be nice and be helpful or don’t post.

Notafan wrote:
@winfan… how do you do this in windows? you don’t 😛

Well, actually, there *is* cygwin (unix commands for Windows systems)
http://www.cygwin.com/

I find the following works rather well…

It lists all files or directories bigger than 50MB (just change size>50 to alter that) in the current directory (change the “.” to a directory path to specify another one) in a friendly, human-readable way and happily plays with spaces (I used it on an NTFS mount in fact).

I get a syntax error when coptying and pasting this command

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