ack/grep search and sort by modification date Is there any way to have `ack` sort the results found by date of modification? (ideally showing the date next to the result?). It doesn't look like `ack` has a date option, but just in case. If this isn't possible with `ack`, how about `grep` or using a combination of tools?

Neither `ack` or `grep` have any notion of a file's modification dates. For that you'll need to generate the list of files first, and then sort them based on afterwards.

You can use `xargs` to run the output of either `ack` or `grep` into another command which will provide the modification dates. For the modification dates you can use `stat` to do that.

### Example


$ grep -Rl awk * | xargs -n 1 stat --printf "%y ------ %n\
"
2013-11-12 10:06:16.000000000 -0500 ------ 100855/tst_ccmds.bash
2013-11-13 00:32:11.000000000 -0500 ------ 100911/cmd.bash
2013-11-23 03:16:17.000000000 -0500 ------ 102298/cmd.bash
2013-12-14 20:06:04.467708173 -0500 ------ 105159/cmd.txt
2013-12-16 03:20:48.166016538 -0500 ------ 105328/cmds.txt
2013-01-14 14:17:39.000000000 -0500 ------ 106932/red5-1.0.1.tar.gz


**NOTE:** This method will only show you the names of the files that matched your query along with the modification date.