newer: Print the Name of the Newest File (Unix Power Tools, 3rd Edition)

8.15. newer: Print the Name of the Newest File

Here's a quick alias that figures out which file in a group is the newest:

-d Section 8.5

alias newer "ls -dt \!* | head -1"

If your system doesn't have a head ( Section 12.12) command, use sed 1q instead.

For example, let's say that you have two files named plan.v1 and plan.v2. If you're like me, you (often) edit the wrong version by mistake -- and then, a few hours later, can't remember what you did. You can use this alias to figure out which file you changed most recently:

% newer plan.v*
plan.v1

I could also have used command substitution (Section 28.14) to handle this in one step:

% emacs `newer plan.*`

-- ML