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I want to copy the files from the most recent directory created. How would I do so in unix?
For example, if I have the directories names as date stamp as such:
/20110311
/20110318
/20110325
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Finding Files Modified on a Specific Date in Linux: You can use the ls command to list files including their modification date by adding the -lt flag as shown in the example below. The flag -l is used to format the output as a log. The flag -t is used to list last modified files, newer first.
-mtime n is an expression that finds the files and directories that have been modified exactly n days ago. In addition, the expression can be used in two other ways: -mtime +n = finds the files and directories modified more than n days ago. -mtime -n = finds the files and directories modified less than n days ago.
This is the answer to the question I think you are asking.
When I deal with many directories that have date/time stamps in the name, I always take the approach that you have which is YYYYMMDD - the great thing about that is that the date order is then also the alphabetical order. In most shells (certainly in bash and I am 90% sure of the others), the '*' expansion is done alphabetically, and by default 'ls' return alphabetical order. Hence
ls | head -1
ls | tail -1
Give you the earliest and the latest dates in the directory.
This can be extended to only keep the last 5 entries etc.
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