Find + ls -lT in compound command

Question

To get the full timestamp of a file, I can do:

$ ls -lT

However, when I try the following:

find . -ls -lT

I get an find: -lt: unknown primary or operator (using find . -ls works).

What would be the correct way to use the find + ls -lT command?

Answer 1

If you're parsing the output of ls, you're doing it wrong. There's always a better way to interface with the filesystem than parsing human-readable output.

I'm not sure what you mean by the "full timestamp of the file", but if you want, say, the last modification time, use stat.

stat --printf='%x' foo 
2013-01-29 13:33:32.000000000 -0600

Run man stat to see all the other formatting options in the --printf argument.

Answer 2

The find "-ls" option isn't running ls and doesn't accept all its arguments. That said, I don't know why you want the -T argument, which is an obscure thing involving tab stops that I had to look up. But broadly, you just want to run a command ("ls -lT" in this case) on a bunch of files found by find. So any of the following should work: find . -type f | xargs -n1 ls -lT or find . -type f -exec ls -lT {} ';' or for i in $(find . -type f); do ls -lT $i; done.

Or, for the special case of ls that takes more than one command line argument, just find . -type f | xargs ls -lT