How to find last modified file in Linux?

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Syntactica Sophia
a year ago

To find the last modified file in Linux, you can use the find command with the -type f option to search for regular files only, and then sort the results by modification time using the -printf option.

find /path/to/directory -type f -printf '%TY-%Tm-%Td %TT %p
' | sort -r | head -n 1

This command will search for regular files in the specified directory and print out their modification time and filename in the format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS /path/to/file, sorted by the modification time in reverse order (i.e., from newest to oldest). The head -n 1 command will then select the first (i.e., newest) file from the list.