Hfrxdjt

I'm writing a bash script and I need to create an array with the 10 most recent image files (from new to old) in the current dir.

I consider "image files" to be files with certain extensions, like .jpg or .png. I only require a few specific image types to be supported, I can also express this in one regex like ".(jpg|png)$".

My problem is, if I try to do this with e.g. $list=(ls -1t *.jpg *.png | head -10) the resulting list of files somehow becomes one element, instead of each filename being a separate element in my array.

If I try to use $list=(find -E . -iregex ".*(jpg|png)" -maxdepth 1 -type f | head -10), I'm not sure how to sort the list on date/time and keep only the filenames. Also find seems to put ./ in front of every file but I can get rid of that with sed. And also with find I still have the problem of my entire list becoming one entry in the $list array.

For bash ≥ 4:

To read output of a command into an array line by line, you should use readarray:

readarray files < <(ls -1t *.jpg *.png | head -10)

... or mapfile:

mapfile -t files < <(ls -1t *.jpg *.png | head -10)

otherwise:

files=()
while IFS= read -r f; do
 files+=( "$f" )
done < <(ls -1t *.jpg *.png | head -10)

See also.

But, filenames are allowed to have linebreaks, so for reading filenames you should rather use find and use delimiter instead of ls -1 which uses n delimiter:

files=()
while IFS= read -r -d $'' f; do
 files+=("$f")
done < <(
 find . -maxdepth 1 -type f 
 -regextype posix-extended -iregex ".*.(jpg|png)$" 
 -printf '%T@t%P' 
 | sort -nrz 
 | head -z -n 10 
 | cut -z -f2-
)

The correct syntax is:

list=($(ls -t *.jpg *.png | head -10))
echo First element: $list[0]
echo Last element: $list[9]

However, this solution will have problems with file names containing space characters (or any white space in general).