Retrieving the last modified file in a directory over FTP using a bash script with curl

Question

I\'m writing a bash script and one of the tasks which needs performing is to connect to an FTP server via curl and find the name of the last modified .zip file.

The name

Answer 1

Edit: Sorry I just realised that the files you need were on the remote FTP server. I had thought they were local, and you were hoping to upload to FTP. So everything below is irrelevant.

Typically I do something like: ls -1rt /path/to/zips/*.zip | tail -n1

This is not always a good idea, spaces in file names etc. But it will return the most recent file name in the directory.

There's also find. You can specify a date range, and name. Depending on what you are doing, you might opt to scan a directory every x minutes for files created in the last x minutes. This has the advantage that it will pick up multiple new files.

Answer 2

You can sort the filenames in one shot with a multi-key sort command and grab the last line with tail to get the latest file.

You'll need to specify -t- to use a dash as sort's field separator, -n to get a numeric sort, and list each field in the order of its priority. The format for a field specifier is:

-k, --key=POS1[,POS2]     start a key at POS1 (origin 1), end it at POS2
                          (default end of line)

So for the year, field 3, you'll need to list it with its 4-character width as -k3,4.

If you sort by the year, month, and day fields in that order, you'll end up with a list that has all the files in date order.

So instead of the for loop above, you can use:

FILE=`curl -u << SERVER INFO >> 2> /dev/null | grep ${FILEPATTERN} | awk -F\  '{print $9}'
    | sort -n -t- -k3,4 -k1,2 -k2,2 |tail -1`