Finding most recently edited file in python

Question

I have a set of folders, and I want to be able to run a function that will find the most recently edited file and tell me the name of the file and the folder it is in.

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Answer 1

For multiple files, if anyone came here for that:

import glob, os

files = glob.glob("/target/directory/path/*/*.mp4")
files.sort(key=os.path.getmtime)

for file in files:
   print(file)

This will print all files in any folder within /path/ that have the .mp4 extension, with the most recently modified file paths at the bottom.

Answer 2

You should look at the os.walk function, as well as os.stat, which can let you do something like:

import os

max_mtime = 0
for dirname,subdirs,files in os.walk("."):
    for fname in files:
        full_path = os.path.join(dirname, fname)
        mtime = os.stat(full_path).st_mtime
        if mtime > max_mtime:
            max_mtime = mtime
            max_dir = dirname
            max_file = fname

print max_dir, max_file

Answer 3

It helps to wrap the built in directory walking to function that yields only full paths to files. Then you can just take the function that returns all files and pick out the one that has the highest modification time:

import os

def all_files_under(path):
    """Iterates through all files that are under the given path."""
    for cur_path, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(path):
        for filename in filenames:
            yield os.path.join(cur_path, filename)

latest_file = max(all_files_under('root'), key=os.path.getmtime)

Answer 4

Use os.path.walk() to traverse the directory tree and os.stat().st_mtime to get the mtime of the files.

The function you pass to os.path.walk() (the visit parameter) just needs to keep track of the largest mtime it's seen and where it saw it.

Answer 5

If anyone is looking for an one line way to do it:

latest_edited_file = max([f for f in os.scandir("path\\to\\search")], key=lambda x: x.stat().st_mtime).name

Answer 6

• use os.walk to list files
• use os.stat to get file modified timestamp (st_mtime)
• put both timestamps and filenames in a list and sort it by timestamp, largest timestamp is most recently edited file.