Last Updated: February 25, 2016

See which files are just touched

If you want to know what the hell just happened on your system, run this command and it will show you the 10 most recently touched files in the current directory. If you do this in '/' it will take obviously a long long time.

Mac:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 stat -f "%m %N" | sort -rn | head -10 | cut -f2- -d" "

Linux:

find . -type f -printf '%T@ %p\n' | sort -n | tail -10 | cut -f2- -d" "

Written by Maikel

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2 Responses

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maikel22

Extra bonus tip: make an alias of it in .bashrc or .zshrc

over 1 year ago ·

maikel22

Or save this bash script like this somewhere in a bin directory:

!/bin/bash

dir=$1
limit=$2
if [ "$dir" == "" ];then
 dir="$PWD"
fi
if [ "$limit" == "" ];then
 limit="20"
fi

files="$(find $dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 stat -f "%m%N" | sort -rn | head -$limit)"
files=${files//" "/"\s"}
for i in $files;do
 secs=${i:0:10}
 file=${i:10}
 file=${file#$dir/}
 time_=$(date -r $secs +"%H:%M:%S")
 date=$(date -r $secs +"%y-%m-%d")
 today=$(date +"%y-%m-%d")
 yesterday=$(date -v "-1d" +"%y-%m-%d")
 if [ "$date" == "$today" ];then
 day="Today "
 elif [ "$date" == "$yesterday" ];then
 day="Yesterday"
 else
 day="$date "
 fi

 echo -e "$day $time_ ${file//"\s"/ }"
 toggle=1
done

over 1 year ago ·