Managing Work-In-Progress Folders with “ls -ltr” | Hacker News Reader

Managing Work-In-Progress Folders with “ls -ltr”

sef.kloninger.com

48 pointssefk24 comments

Combine watch with ls -ltr and you have a neat little way to keep an eye on a given file or directory:

    watch -n 1 ls -ltr

Like the author, I probably use 'ls -ltr' more often than any other variation of ls. It's more useful to view most directories in date order (newest nearest to your cursor), although of course this probably won't be news to most GUI / Windows users.

Edit: A small shell script over my history proves my guess is correct:

    plain ls: 59
    ls -ltr: 8
    ll: 6

I do basically the same thing. In fact I have 'ls -cr' automatically run after every cd.

The problem with aliases of course is that you end up typing them on other people's systems and looking foolish. Still, I use 'lcr' for 'ls -cr', 'll' for 'ls -alF', etc.

I even have 'l' as 'ls -halF'. And it's used so much that the L button on my keyboard seems to grow more fungi than the others.

Funny, I've come to use the same system some time ago, but for general to-dos. I just use more readable filenames, with spaces instead of dashes and more complete sentences, and in the file content I put more detailed info and links do resources.

The great thing about this is that it's utterly portable. You can sync with Dropbox, explore with a file manager, zip and send by email, grep, open and edit with scripts... The possibilities are endless, and you don't have to install anything.

I always use ls -lart. It's handy for a lot of different things. What's the name of that file I just downloaded? Which subdirectory of my home directory is the one where that program saves its config information? What have I been working on in the last month?

Why not recursive? Use the following command if you want to have one directory per idea, rather than a single file:

  find -type f -print0 | xargs --null ls -ltr

I know it gets talked about quite a lot round here but I find zsh really quite useful for this type of thing..

the zsh equivalent of the above, for me would be

    ls **/* -ltr

(Edit)[ for an exact reproduction ]

    ls **/*(.) -ltr

if you wanted to put a date range on it.. for example, only files from the last 5 days..

    ls **/*(m-5) -ltr

or the last 5 hours

    ls **/*(mh-5) -ltr

there's loads more of these http://grml.org/zsh/zsh-lovers.html, obviously your shell is a matter of preference, and if you know bash or something similar well enough then the incentive to change is obviously lessened.. but personally I've found that a whole series of small improvements (for me) added up to a pretty large win

edit: as pointed out by pyre, my initial suggestion isn't an exact replica.. but was the first thing that came to mind for me.. i guess s/the\ zsh\ equivalent/something\ similar\ in\ zsh/

edit again:

    /tmp/ $ mkdir -p /tmp/test1/test2/test3                          
    /tmp/ $ touch /tmp/test1/test2/test3/test4                       
    /tmp/ $ ls -ltr /tmp/test1/**/*(.)                               
    -rw-r--r-- 1 usr grp 0 Aug  7 15:49 /tmp/test1/test2/test3/test4 
    /tmp/ $ find /tmp/test1 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -ltr       
    -rw-r--r-- 1 usr grp 0 Aug  7 15:49 /tmp/test1/test2/test3/test4

  **/*

does not match the '-type f' part of his filter:

  $ mkdir -p /tmp/test1/test2/test3
  $ touch /tmp/test1/test2/test3/test4
  $ ls -ltr /tmp/test1/**/*
  -rw-r--r-- 1 usr grp    0 2012-08-07 09:59 /tmp/test1/test2/test3/test4

  /tmp/test1/test2:
  total 4
  drwxr-xr-x 2 usr grp 4096 2012-08-07 09:59 test3

  /tmp/test1/test2/test3:
  total 0
  -rw-r--r-- 1 usr grp 0 2012-08-07 09:59 test4

On the other hand:

  $ find /tmp/test1 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -ltr
  -rw-r--r-- 1 usr grp 0 2012-08-07 09:59 /tmp/test1/test2/test3/test4

Nice to know, thanks! But, how does it work with file names containing spaces (or other strange characters)?

Edit: just to clarify: my question concerns the zsh method. Regarding find+xargs, I wrote that comment :-) Actually, this edit would be an answer to zap; HN does not let me reply directly to him: is it to prevent flame-wars?

   /tmp/ $ mkdir -p test1/test2/test3                                       

   /tmp/ $ touch test1/test2/test3/test4                                    
   
   /tmp/ $ ls -ltr test1/**/*(.)                                            
   -rw-r--r-- 1 usr grp 0 Aug  9 11:11 test1/test2/test3/test4              

   /tmp/ $ touch test1/test2/test3/test\ with\ spaces                       

   /tmp/ $ ls -ltr test1/**/*(.)                                            
   -rw-r--r-- 1 usr grp 0 Aug  9 11:11 test1/test2/test3/test4              
   -rw-r--r-- 1 usr grp 0 Aug  9 11:12 test1/test2/test3/test with spaces

Thats what the print0 arg in find and the --null arg in xargs are for.

print0 prints the file name followed by a NULL character (rather than newline) Using the --null/-0 arg makes xargs look for NULLs as delimiters and treat everything else literally.

I keep considering moving to zsh. This example sure makes it look worthwhile. Thanks.

I've used `ls -ltr` for years, and just recently I wrote a recursive version with the help of my local LUG mailing list. Here is my favorite version (put into a script in ~/bin):

    find "$1" -printf '%TY-%Tm-%Td_%TH:%TM:%TS\t%p\n' | sort -r

It'd be easy to add `-type f` if that's what you want.

find(1) has an -ls built-in, thought the format is slightly different. You can also use -printf to suit. Also, later GNU finds make some uses of xargs unnecessary.

    find -type f -exec ls -ltr {} +

That made me read about `+` accumulation, happy day.

I didn't know about + either -- neato! Thanks.

Interesting timing on this; I just starting using almost this exact command (`ls -1tr`) days ago. Great for checking the last few things in that giant `Downloads/` folder

ls -lrt is probably the command I use the most in Unix since ... 20 years.

Hey can someone write me a script that will draw a bar chart of the frequency by date/month/year of each file's last modification time (in a directory)? Free beer. I promise!

I use it frequently enough that I've aliased "lt" to it. Any other flags people use with it?

This is _exactly_ what version control is for.

Listing files in order of modification time?

Not literally. I should clarify.

Using ls -ltr will indeed list files in order of modification time, but when I read 'Managing Work-In-Progress Folders' I think version control.

ls will list your files, but it won't really 'manage' anything.

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