Is there a cross-*nix compatible way to get file modified timestamp?

Question

Trying to solve this problem I've come up with solutions that are not compatible between ubuntu and osx. I wish to make one replacement command for the following two, which differ in two characters:

osx:

find . -type f -exec stat -f "%m {}" {} \;| sort -n | tail -n 1 | cut -d ' ' -f 2

ubu:

find . -type f -exec stat -c "%Y {}" {} \;| sort -n | tail -n 1 | cut -d ' ' -f 2

Answer 1

The stat command is not part of POSIX, so systems are allowed to have differing implementations.

Assuming Perl is available, the following should work:

-exec perl -MFile::stat -e 'print stat($_)->mtime, " $_\n" for @ARGV' {} \;

-exec perl -e 'print ((stat($_))[9], " $_\n") for @ARGV' {} \;

The version with -MFile::stat is more readable, but unfortunately several times slower.

The complete script would look like:

find . -type f -exec perl -e 'print ((stat($_))[9], " $_\n") for @ARGV' {} + |
  sort -n | tail -n 1 | cut -d " " -f 2-

(note the 2- at the end)