Find the newest folder in a directory in Python

One liner to find latest

# Find latest
import os, glob
max(glob.glob(os.path.join(directory, '*/')), key=os.path.getmtime)

One liner to find n'th latest

# Find n'th latest
import os, glob
sorted(glob.glob(os.path.join(directory, '*/')), key=os.path.getmtime)[-n]

There is no actual trace of the "time created" in most OS / filesystems: what you get as mtime is the time a file or directory was modified (so for example creating a file in a directory updates the directory's mtime) -- and from ctime, when offered, the time of the latest inode change (so it would be updated by creating or removing a sub-directory).

Assuming you're fine with e.g. "last-modified" (and your use of "created" in the question was just an error), you can find (e.g.) all subdirectories of the current directory:

import os

all_subdirs = [d for d in os.listdir('.') if os.path.isdir(d)]

and get the one with the latest mtime (in Python 2.5 or better):

latest_subdir = max(all_subdirs, key=os.path.getmtime)

If you need to operate elsewhere than the current directory, it's not very different, e.g.:

def all_subdirs_of(b='.'):
  result = []
  for d in os.listdir(b):
    bd = os.path.join(b, d)
    if os.path.isdir(bd): result.append(bd)
  return result

the latest_subdir assignment does not change given, as all_subdirs, any list of paths (be they paths of directories or files, that max call gets the latest-modified one).

Tags:

Python