How do I find the newest file in a directory using a PowerShell script?

Question

If, for example, I have a directory which contains the following files:

Test-20120626-1023.txt Test-20120626-0710.txt Test-20120626-2202.txt Test-20120626-1915.txt Test-20120626-1142.txt 

As you can see, each file name contains the time of creation which is in a sortable format.

How do I find the name of the latest file name (in this case Test-20120626-2202.txt) and store it in variable?

Note: The directory path is also stored in a variable if it makes any difference.

Answer 1

You could try something like this:

$dir = "C:\test_code" $latest = Get-ChildItem -Path $dir | Sort-Object LastAccessTime -Descending | Select-Object -First 1 $latest.name 

Answer 2

If the name is the equivalent creation time of the file property CreationTime, you can easily use:

$a = Dir | Sort CreationTime -Descending | Select Name -First 1 

then

$a.name 

contains the name file.

I think it also works like this if name always have the same format (date and time with padding 0, for example, 20120102-0001):

$a = Dir | Sort Name -Descending | Select Name -First 1