How to copy the top 10 most recent files from one directory to another?

Question

Al my html files reside here :

/home/thinkcode/myfiles/html/

I want to move the newest 10 files to /home/thinkcode/Test

I

Answer 1

Here is a version which doesn't use ls. It should be less vulnerable to strange characters in file names:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*.html' -print0 
     \| xargs -0 stat --printf "%Y\t%n\n" 
     \| sort -n 
     \| tail  -n 10 
     \| cut -f 2 
     \| xargs cp -t ../Test/

I used find for a couple of reasons:

1) if there are too many files in a directory, bash will balk at the wildcard expansion*.

2) Using the -print0 argument to find gets around the problem of bash expanding whitespace in a filename in to multiple tokens.

* Actually, bash shares a memory buffer for its wildcard expansion and its environment variables, so it's not strictly a function of the number of file names, but rather the total length of the file names and environment variables. Too many environment variables => no wildcard expansion.

EDIT: Incorporated some of @glennjackman's improvements. Kept the initial use of find to avoid the use of the wildcard expansion which might fail in a large directory.