Directory Listing based on time [duplicate]

Question

This question already has answers here:

How do you get a directory listing sorted by creation date in python? (16 answers)

Closed 6 years ago.

How to list the files in a directory based on timestamp?

 os.listdir() 

lists in arbitrary order.

Is there a build-in function to list based on timestamp? or by any order?

Answer 1

My immediate solution is,

 >>> import commands
 >>> a = commands.getstatusoutput("ls -ltr | awk '{print $9}'")
 >>> list  =a[1].split('\n')

As per the duplicate post pointed by bluish, this is a bad solution; why is it bad?

Answer 2

You could call stat() on each of the files and sort by one of the timestamps, perhaps by using a key function that returns a file's timestamp.

import os

def sorted_ls(path):
    mtime = lambda f: os.stat(os.path.join(path, f)).st_mtime
    return list(sorted(os.listdir(path), key=mtime))

print(sorted_ls('documents'))