Finding most recently edited file in python

Question

I have a set of folders, and I want to be able to run a function that will find the most recently edited file and tell me the name of the file and the folder it is in.

Folder layout:

root
    Folder A
        File A
        File B
    Folder B
        File C
        File D
etc...

Any tips to get me started as i've hit a bit of a wall.

Answer 1

You can use

os.walk

See: http://docs.python.org/library/os.html

Answer 2

You should look at the os.walk function, as well as os.stat, which can let you do something like:

import os

max_mtime = 0
for dirname,subdirs,files in os.walk("."):
    for fname in files:
        full_path = os.path.join(dirname, fname)
        mtime = os.stat(full_path).st_mtime
        if mtime > max_mtime:
            max_mtime = mtime
            max_dir = dirname
            max_file = fname

print max_dir, max_file

Answer 3

• use os.walk to list files
• use os.stat to get file modified timestamp (st_mtime)
• put both timestamps and filenames in a list and sort it by timestamp, largest timestamp is most recently edited file.

Answer 4

Use os.path.walk() to traverse the directory tree and os.stat().st_mtime to get the mtime of the files.

The function you pass to os.path.walk() (the visit parameter) just needs to keep track of the largest mtime it's seen and where it saw it.

Answer 5

It helps to wrap the built in directory walking to function that yields only full paths to files. Then you can just take the function that returns all files and pick out the one that has the highest modification time:

import os

def all_files_under(path):
    """Iterates through all files that are under the given path."""
    for cur_path, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(path):
        for filename in filenames:
            yield os.path.join(cur_path, filename)

latest_file = max(all_files_under('root'), key=os.path.getmtime)