Like the author, I probably use 'ls -ltr' more often than any other variation of ls. It's more useful to view most directories in date order (newest nearest to your cursor), although of course this probably won't be news to most GUI / Windows users.
Edit: A small shell script over my history proves my guess is correct:
I do basically the same thing. In fact I have 'ls -cr' automatically run after every cd.
The problem with aliases of course is that you end up typing them on other people's systems and looking foolish. Still, I use 'lcr' for 'ls -cr', 'll' for 'ls -alF', etc.
Funny, I've come to use the same system some time ago, but for general to-dos. I just use more readable filenames, with spaces instead of dashes and more complete sentences, and in the file content I put more detailed info and links do resources.
The great thing about this is that it's utterly portable. You can sync with Dropbox, explore with a file manager, zip and send by email, grep, open and edit with scripts... The possibilities are endless, and you don't have to install anything.
I always use ls -lart. It's handy for a lot of different things. What's the name of that file I just downloaded? Which subdirectory of my home directory is the one where that program saves its config information? What have I been working on in the last month?
I know it gets talked about quite a lot round here but I find zsh really quite useful for this type of thing..
the zsh equivalent of the above, for me would be
ls **/* -ltr
(Edit)[ for an exact reproduction ]
ls **/*(.) -ltr
if you wanted to put a date range on it.. for example, only files from the last 5 days..
ls **/*(m-5) -ltr
or the last 5 hours
ls **/*(mh-5) -ltr
there's loads more of these http://grml.org/zsh/zsh-lovers.html, obviously your shell is a matter of preference, and if you know bash or something similar well enough then the incentive to change is obviously lessened.. but personally I've found that a whole series of small improvements (for me) added up to a pretty large win
edit: as pointed out by pyre, my initial suggestion isn't an exact replica.. but was the first thing that came to mind for me.. i guess s/the\ zsh\ equivalent/something\ similar\ in\ zsh/
edit again:
/tmp/ $ mkdir -p /tmp/test1/test2/test3
/tmp/ $ touch /tmp/test1/test2/test3/test4
/tmp/ $ ls -ltr /tmp/test1/**/*(.)
-rw-r--r-- 1 usr grp 0 Aug 7 15:49 /tmp/test1/test2/test3/test4
/tmp/ $ find /tmp/test1 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -ltr
-rw-r--r-- 1 usr grp 0 Aug 7 15:49 /tmp/test1/test2/test3/test4
Nice to know, thanks! But, how does it work with file names containing spaces (or other strange characters)?
Edit: just to clarify: my question concerns the zsh method. Regarding find+xargs, I wrote that comment :-)
Actually, this edit would be an answer to zap; HN does not let me reply directly to him: is it to prevent flame-wars?
Thats what the print0 arg in find and the --null arg in xargs are for.
print0 prints the file name followed by a NULL character (rather than newline)
Using the --null/-0 arg makes xargs look for NULLs as delimiters and treat everything else literally.
I've used `ls -ltr` for years, and just recently I wrote a recursive version with the help of my local LUG mailing list. Here is my favorite version (put into a script in ~/bin):
find(1) has an -ls built-in, thought the format is slightly different. You can also use -printf to suit. Also, later GNU finds make some uses of xargs unnecessary.
Interesting timing on this; I just starting using almost this exact command (`ls -1tr`) days ago. Great for checking the last few things in that giant `Downloads/` folder
Hey can someone write me a script that will draw a bar chart of the frequency by date/month/year of each file's last modification time (in a directory)? Free beer. I promise!