Get folder (or sub-files/folders) last modification date and time

Question

Is it possible to get the modification date and time of a folder?
I know you can use stat -f "%m" folder, but it doesn't reflect sub-files/folders changes.

Things that doesn't work:

• ls -l folder - doesn't reflect changes inside the folder
• stat -f "%m" folder - same as above
• date -r folder - same again
• find foo bar baz -printf - the printf option doesn't exist on my version of find

Versions of things:

• OS: Mac OS X 10.7.1
• Bash: GNU bash, version 3.2.48(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin11)

Answer 1

Solution:

find . -exec stat -f "%m" \{} \; | sort -n -r | head -1

Explanation:

1. the find command traverses the current directory (.) and for each file encountered executes (-exec) the command stat -f "%m". stat -f "%m" prints the last modification unix timestamp of the file.
2. sort -n -r sorts the output of the find command numerically (-n) in reverse order (-r). This will list the latest modification timestamp first.
3. head -1 then extracts the first line of the output from sort. This is the latest modification unix timestamp of all the files.

Answer 2

You could try 'date -r folder' to give you a date last modified