32 – Most recently-modified file

Due to flexibility of the built-in max, it takes one single line of code to find the most recently-modified file in a directory:

from pathlib import Path

folder_to_search = Path("/path/to/folder")
most_recent = max(folder.iterdir(), key=lambda p: p.stat().st_mtime)
print(most_recent)  # /path/to/folder/some_file.txt

This works by using the method stat that provides access to file statistics and then using the attribute st_mtime that contains the time of the last file modification.

This line of code is highly flexible!

Do you want to skip directories and only consider files? In that case, filter with a generator expression:

most_recent = max(
    (p for p in folder.iterdir() if p.is_file()),
    key=lambda p: p.stat().st_mtime,
)

Do you want the search to be recursive? Then, use folder.rglob(*) instead of folder.iterdir().