Managing Work-In-Progress Folders with “ls -ltr”

Combine watch with ls -ltr and you have a neat little way to keep an eye on a given file or directory:<p><pre><code> watch -n 1 ls -ltr</code></pre>

Like the author, I probably use 'ls -ltr' more often than any other variation of ls. It's more useful to view most directories in date order (newest nearest to your cursor), although of course this probably <i>won't</i> be news to most GUI / Windows users.<p>Edit: A small shell script over my history proves my guess is correct:<p><pre><code> plain ls: 59 ls -ltr: 8 ll: 6</code></pre>

I do basically the same thing. In fact I have 'ls -cr' automatically run after every cd.<p>The problem with aliases of course is that you end up typing them on other people's systems and looking foolish. Still, I use 'lcr' for 'ls -cr', 'll' for 'ls -alF', etc.

Funny, I've come to use the same system some time ago, but for general to-dos. I just use more readable filenames, with spaces instead of dashes and more complete sentences, and in the file content I put more detailed info and links do resources.<p>The great thing about this is that it's utterly portable. You can sync with Dropbox, explore with a file manager, zip and send by email, grep, open and edit with scripts... The possibilities are endless, and you don't have to install anything.

I always use ls -lart. It's handy for a lot of different things. What's the name of that file I just downloaded? Which subdirectory of my home directory is the one where that program saves its config information? What have I been working on in the last month?

Why not recursive? Use the following command if you want to have one directory per idea, rather than a single file:<p><pre><code> find -type f -print0 | xargs --null ls -ltr</code></pre>

Interesting timing on this; I just starting using <i>almost</i> this exact command (`ls -1tr`) days ago. Great for checking the last few things in that giant `Downloads/` folder

Hey can someone write me a script that will draw a bar chart of the frequency by date/month/year of each file's last modification time (in a directory)? Free beer. I promise!

I use it frequently enough that I've aliased "lt" to it. Any other flags people use with it?

This is _exactly_ what version control is for.