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.

Answer 2

In python 3.5+

from pathlib import Path
sorted(Path('.').iterdir(), key=lambda f: f.stat().st_mtime)

Answer 3

from pathlib import Path
import os

sorted(Path('./').iterdir(), key=lambda t: t.stat().st_mtime)

or

sorted(Path('./').iterdir(), key=os.path.getmtime)

or

sorted(os.scandir('./'), key=lambda t: t.stat().st_mtime)

where m time is modified time.

Answer 4

Here's my version:

def getfiles(dirpath):
    a = [s for s in os.listdir(dirpath)
         if os.path.isfile(os.path.join(dirpath, s))]
    a.sort(key=lambda s: os.path.getmtime(os.path.join(dirpath, s)))
    return a

First, we build a list of the file names. isfile() is used to skip directories; it can be omitted if directories should be included. Then, we sort the list in-place, using the modify date as the key.

Answer 5

# *** the shortest and best way ***
# getmtime --> sort by modified time
# getctime --> sort by created time

import glob,os

lst_files = glob.glob("*.txt")
lst_files.sort(key=os.path.getmtime)
print("\n".join(lst_files))