How to grab most recently modified file

Question

I have a folder with a bunch of files. Is there a way to select the file that is the most recently updated?

For example:

FTP_FOLDER = os.path.join(os.getcwd(), 'ftp_folder')
xml_files = [file for file in glob.glob(os.path.join(FTP_FOLDER, '*.xml'))]

Now, how to get the most recent xml_file?

Answer 1

Use os.path.getmtime to get the file modification time:

import os
xml_files.sort(key=os.path.getmtime)
print xml_files[-1] # most recent file