How do you get a directory listing sorted by creation date in python?

Question

What is the best way to get a list of all files in a directory, sorted by date [created | modified], using python, on a windows machine?

Answer 1

Here's a one-liner:

import os
import time
from pprint import pprint

pprint([(x[0], time.ctime(x[1].st_ctime)) for x in sorted([(fn, os.stat(fn)) for fn in os.listdir(".")], key = lambda x: x[1].st_ctime)])

This calls os.listdir() to get a list of the filenames, then calls os.stat() for each one to get the creation time, then sorts against the creation time.

Note that this method only calls os.stat() once for each file, which will be more efficient than calling it for each comparison in a sort.