List files by last edited date
You can use:
ls -Rt
where -R means recursive (include subdirectories) and -t means "sort by last modification date".
To see a list of files sorted by date modified, use:
ls -l -Rt
An alias can also be created to achieve this:
alias lt='ls -lht'
lt
Where -h gives a more readable output.
If you'd like a master list in which all the files are sorted together by modification date, showing the directory they're in, but not grouped by directory, you can use this:
find . -type f -printf "%-.22T+ %M %n %-8u %-8g %8s %Tx %.8TX %p\n" | sort | cut -f 2- -d ' '
The result looks a lot like ls -l:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3892 08/11/2009 11:03:36 /usr/share/man/man1/xmllint.1.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 22946 08/13/2009 11:59:20 /usr/share/man/man1/curl.1.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 728 08/17/2009 12:06:33 /usr/share/man/man1/thunderbird.1.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 873 08/18/2009 10:52:47 /usr/share/man/man1/libgnutls-config.1.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2552 08/19/2009 02:00:34 /usr/share/man/man3/Purple.3pm.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9546 08/19/2009 02:02:00 /usr/share/man/man1/pidgin.1.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2201 08/19/2009 02:02:46 /usr/share/man/man3/Pidgin.3pm.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 926 08/19/2009 02:03:05 /usr/share/man/man1/purple-remote.1.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 18052 08/19/2009 04:11:47 /usr/share/man/man1/mono.1.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1845 08/19/2009 04:11:47 /usr/share/man/man5/mono-config.5.gz
Mac OS X
For those of you using Mac OS X, option -printf is not available on BSD find (you will get this error: find: -printf: unknown primary or operator). Fortunately you can Install GNU find through Homebrew (there should be an option to Fink and Macports as well):
brew install findutils
After install it the GNU find should be available to you as gfind. So, all you need to do is change the line above to:
gfind . -type f -printf "%-.22T+ %M %n %-8u %-8g %8s %Tx %.8TX %p\n" | sort | cut -f 2- -d ' '