mjhjmtu

I am working on a RHEL7 box. I need to recursively find all the LATEST (and only the latest) .log files in each sub-folder below a certain hierarchy and list their full paths in a file 'all_logs.txt'.

My find command looks like this and works to return full paths to ~6000 records:

cd $SEARCHDIR
find . -iname computer_import_*.log > all_logs.txt

The problem here is that this find command is finding ALL computer_import_.log where I just need the latest computer_import_.log file in each sub-folder searched.

I tried with below command and it worked fine

find . -type f -iname "computer_import_*.log" -daystart -mtime -1 > all_logs.txt

find $SEARCHDIR -type f -iname "computer_import_*.log" -mtime -10 > all_logs.txt

This will find all files that match the -iname argument, restricted to being modified within 10-days of the run. See the find manpages for more details.

Note that the -iname argument is quoted so that find interprets the argument rather than the shell before find runs.

If you want to see what's returned based on these criteria do, for example:

find $SEARCHDIR -type f -iname "computer_import_*.log" -mtime -10 -exec ls -ld +

This will perform an ls on each file returned, thus showing the last modification date. Change the value of -mtime <+-N> to your taste. A value of -90 would return files modified in the last 90 days. A positive value of +90 would return files modified over 90 days ago.

** ALTERNATIVE INTERPRETATION **

Given the requirement to find only the most recent file in any and all sub-directories, do something like this:

find $SEARCHDIR -type d > /var/tmp/mydirs
while read -r line
do
 ls -alt "$line" | grep -Ev "^(d|total)" | head -1 >> /var/tmp/mylogs
done < /var/tmp/mydirs

The ls orders the contents of a directory as newest to oldest modification date. The grep eliminates directory entries and total size lines. head snips the first file (if any) from the directory being examined.