I faced some issue while i list all the files in my directory , i would like to print or fetch just the file which is before the last file was modified

server:cd user/local
server/user/local/: ls -ltrh 

-rw-r--r--  1 Pepe  staff     0B Nov  7 13:40 1.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 Pepe  staff     0B Nov  7 13:40 2.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 Pepe  staff     0B Nov  7 13:40 3.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 Pepe  staff     0B Nov  7 13:58 5.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 Pepe  staff     9B Nov  7 14:25 6.txt

I hope i can have the result 5.txt

Any idea ?

CodePudding user response：

This is a fairly complex-looking pipeline, but each piece is pretty straightforward:

stat -c '%Y:%n' * | sort -t: -n | cut -d: -f2- | tail -2 | head -1

check your stat man page to see if your version has the -c option.

CodePudding user response：

Here's an adaptation of the method in https://stackoverflow.com/a/73613596/3387716
It finds the n^th last modified file and puts its "basename" in the variable var:

#!/bin/bash

n=2

IFS='' read -r -d '' var < <(
    find user/local -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf '%T@ %p\0' |
    sort -z -nrt ' ' -k1,1 |
    awk -F '/' -v n="$n" '
        BEGIN { RS = ORS = "\0" }
        NR == n { print $NF }
    '
) || {
    echo "Not enough files in dir" 1>&2
    exit 0
}

echo "$var"