List search results in modification order

Question

Now spotlight doesn't seem to search all invisible files.... can anyone help me limp along with a bit of unix please?
I have "find ~/ -mtime -1 -ls" to search for stuff I've touched today
and "ls -lt" to list stuff with most recent first - they seem to work
What I can't seem to do is get the "today" list to sort with the most recent first etc
I think I am looking for something like:
find ~/ -mtime -1 | (sort by date please) | open -f
sorry about this but it's Unix day one here!
G5   Mac OS X (10.4.3)  

Answer 1

Hi Beau Geste,
   UNIX day one?? I find that hard to believe; you seem to be pretty good. It hasn't been but a few years since I asked a friend what those numbers meant in a chmod command he told me to execute. You're using the "find" command in a fairly elegant way. If you're really just beginning, you'll go far!
   Fortunately, someone asked about "sort" recently so I'm up on it. The man page is somewhat spartan so the "info sort" helped a lot. My vote for your command would be:
find ~ -mtime -1 -ls | sort -k 8,8Mr -k 9,9nr -k 10,10r
   The -k options specify fields by which to sort, in order of priority. By default, a line is split into fields at white space, as the shell does. A "-t" switch can be used to specify alternative field separators but white space is what we want here.
   The first field is the month and sort has a nice modifier, 'M', that sorts three digit month listings properly. Given what you're sorting, that would only matter on the first of each month but one might as well be thorough. The next field is day and I sort that numerically. That way, 10 is bigger than 9, since "find -ls" doesn't put zeroes in front of single digit numbers in dates. It does pad the "time of day" field so alphabetical order is the same as numerical order.
   Note that the 'r' modifier must be used on each field. If I put a '-r' option at the beginning, it would be a "global modifier". Those are ignore when modifiers, like 'M' and 'n', are used with a field. It would still apply to the "time of day" field, since no local modifier is used.
   You may observe that this will probably fail on New Year's Day. A special sort command would be required for that but if you're going to be doing this on New Year's Day, you've got more problems than we can fix here!
Gary
~~~~
   Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, and a dark
   side, and it holds the universe together ...
         -- Carl Zwanzig