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.

Answer 2

ls -lt *.html | head -10 | awk '{print $NF}' | xargs -i cp {} DestDir

In the above example DestDir is the destination directory for the copy.

Add -t after xargs to see the commands as they execute. I.e., xargs -i -t cp {} DestDir.

For more information check out the xargs command.

EDIT: As pointed out by @DennisWilliamson (and also checking the current man page) re the -i option This option is deprecated; use -I instead..

Also, both solutions presented depend on the filenames in questions don't contain any blanks or tabs.

Answer 3

cp seems to understand back-ticked commands. So you could use a command like this one to copy the 10 latest files to another folder like e.g. /test:

cp `ls -t *.htm | head -10` /test

Answer 4

ls -lt *.htm | head -10 | awk '{print "cp " $9 " ../Test/"$9}' | sh