Lets say I want to find the youngest/newest *.txt file inside a folder, for example /tmp/? I wrote this little python script for this, but are there better ways to do it?
By youngest I mean the file with the least recent change or creation date? All files have these timestamps. But could I also watch the filesystems folder for file creation events?
import os
import glob
def find_newest_file_type(glob_path):
# youngest file has biggest timestamp
youngest = -10
ultpath = "file_does_not_exist0xfadfadsfadfads.asdfajsdklfj"
for file in glob.iglob(glob_path):
mtime = os.path.getmtime(file)
if mtime > youngest:
youngest = mtime
ultpath = file
return ultpath
newest = find_newest_file_type("/tmp/*.txt")
sure, you could probably also do all those other things in bash too, but you could do it all in python as well 😁
I tend to use bash more for manipulating files and directories. I would probably write a bash script for all the stuff you’re doing.
I would probably use python for more complicated logic or when python has some library that lets me do something bash doesn’t easily do.
Finding and moving files is easy in bash, but automating making changes to an Excel sheet is very difficult to do with bash, so I would use Python to automate changes to an Excel file, for example. There are libraries that exist in python you can import and use for that kind of task.
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