Archive for January, 2009

Celebrate the new year with a blog post discussing the oldest files that are still sitting somewhere beneath your home directory! The procedure is simple:

1. Run the following script in your home directory. (You might want to use less to read the output.)
2. Ignore files whose date does not reflect your own activity.
3. List the oldest files in a blog post and discuss!

#!/usr/bin/env python
"""Print last-modified times of files beneath '.', oldest first."""
import os, os.path, time
paths = ( os.path.join(b,f) for (b,ds,fs) in os.walk('.') for f in fs )
for mtime, path in sorted( (os.lstat(p).st_mtime, p) for p in paths ):
    print time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d", time.localtime(mtime)), path

Only include files whose last-modified time is a date on which you really touched the file. The file's time should neither result from an error (a few files beneath my own home directory have an incorrect date of 1970-01-01), nor from unpacking someone else's archive that has old files inside of it. For example, I myself have excluded the following pair of nearly 17-year-old files because their dates reflect their age inside of the Python 3.0 source archive, instead of the actual moment last month when they became part of my home directory:

1992-03-02 ./src/Python-3.0/Demo/scripts/wh.py
1992-03-02 ./src/Python-3.0/Tools/scripts/dutree.doc

But there is no requirement that the actual content of each file you list be your own. Whether you wrote the file yourself long ago, or downloaded it from some ancient and forgotten FTP site, you have a story to share!

Within the rules given above, here are the oldest files beneath my own home directory: