list all files by modification date

[aloispichler]

is there a nice eza option to list all files recursively (including subdirectories), but sorted by modification date only?
So something as

eza --long --recurse --sorted=modified

but sorted by modified, NOT presorted per folder.

[agammann]

You can get a single global sort by collecting the files first, then giving them to one eza invocation. --recurse creates a listing for each directory, which is why its results remain grouped by folder.

For Bash on Linux:

mapfile -d '' files < <(find . -type f -print0)
if ((${#files[@]})); then
    eza --long --sort=modified --reverse -- "${files[@]}"
fi

This includes regular files below the current directory, including hidden files, and displays the newest modified files first. Remove --reverse for oldest first. The NUL-delimited collection and quoted array preserve spaces in filenames; the empty-array check avoids accidentally listing the current directory when no files were found.

I tested this with eza 0.23.5 and files in separate directories with deliberately different modification times, including a filename containing a space. The output was one list sorted by timestamp across both directories. As this uses one argument list, it is subject to the OS command-line size limit for very large trees.

The manual documents modified and --reverse.