Oldest files meme

Doug Hellmann has brought a meme to my attention, and I’d be remiss in my duties if I didn’t act upon it.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work. Save a copy of this Python script, say as a file named oldest.py:

#!/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

Then run it in your home directory (using less to page through results, since there’ll probably be a lot of them):

python oldest.py | less

And talk about the oldest files there (which is to say, the oldest files you personally had something to do with).

I started working at the Journal-World in February 2006, and I’m actually on my second company-issued laptop, so I paged ahead through all the various Mac framework files (which have misleading timestamps dating back to when someone at Apple last changed them) to the period when I actually started working here, and found the oldest stuff I’d personally done (most of which has had mtime lovingly preserved by various migration/restore processes). That turns out to be a rough tie between a few things, all within a few minutes of each other:

Some Emacs extensions in ~/.elisp.

My SSH keys in ~/.ssh.

A Subversion auth file.

Some irssi configuration files.

Some lftp configuration files.

After that come a few copies of tax forms (since I was doing my final round of taxes from freelancing around that time), then more mundane stuff like copying over some music into iTunes.

This probably says a lot about what I consider to be essential for a machine I’ll be using in day-to-day work: I pretty much live in Emacs (that’s GNU Emacs, running inside a screen session inside a terminal window, btw), I use SSH all the time, we use Subversion both for the main Django repository and at work, I use irssi (also running in the screen session) for IRC and lftp is the One True FTP client.

All of these files are still used on a daily basis today (and in fact were being used daily on the older laptop I migrated from and should run this on later, and on the still-older desktop machine I migrated from before that…).

Anybody else want to have a go?

On January 3, 2009, Elliott Hird said:

I have so much stuff in ~ that it hasn’t finished running yet, and probably won’t any time soon…

On January 3, 2009, @jcsalterego said:

I recently discovered lftp and it is indeed awesome. irssi is also very much wonderful.

Having been an avid emacs user as well for several years, I avoid the screen+emacs combination, because of the C-a/^A keyspace conflict. How do you deal with that? (I use C-a quite often in emacs.)

On January 3, 2009, Doug said:

I have this in my ~/.screenrc file:

# Use C-O instead of C-a as this makes more sense for Emacs
escape ^Oo

On January 3, 2009, Sean said:

I have ` escape ` in my .screenrc for convenient one-finger access to screen shortcuts. I rarely use backtick in anger and when I do a double-tap on the key isn’t onerous (after all we should all be using repr in Python and $() for shell-embedding these days).

Ironically I had to use 8 separate backtick characters to get the first code span above right (assuming I did).

On January 3, 2009, Sean said:

…and sure enough the Markdown processor I checked with appears to have different rules for escaping backticks to the one used by this blog. How about I try a less complex approach:

My .screenrc contains:

escape “

On January 3, 2009, Rob said:

A lot more fun than I thought. I’ve rebuilt all my configurations from scratch several times over the years, so my oldest files are bits of old archive that never got filed to permanent cold-storage. http://v.cx/2009/01/oldest_files

On January 3, 2009, @jcsalterego said:

Sean, what exactly is that line?

escape ^Oo looks pretty awesome — thanks Doug!

On January 3, 2009, Sean said:

jcsalterego: Yes, it’s still not right is it? Second time I assume Smartypants or equivalent meddled with it.

The line in my file is escape <backtick><backtick> (where those are actually literal backtick characters) - so to switch to the next screen window I hit backtick then space, for a new window backtick then ‘c’ and for a literal backtick I hit backtick then backtick again.

On January 3, 2009, Doug Hellmann said:

Hmm, I have a bunch of old config files, too. My .bashrc and .emacs are touched once in a while, so they’re new. But I have an old .zope-external-edit from 2006. :-)

On January 3, 2009, Deron Meranda said:

.nethackrc from June 1991

My .emacs is also pretty old.

Also, I use ^T for my screen escape, since that’s the emacs combo I tend to use least often.

On January 8, 2009, Paul Smith said:

One-liner:

find . -print0 | xargs -0 stat -c ‘%y %n’ | sort | less

I have a checked-out SVN of Python 2.5.2 below my $HOME, and some of the oldest files in the results are from the repo, circa 1992, Lib/plat-irix5/GL.py being the oldest (1992-01-24).

Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned was how many files lying around have obviously wrong mtimes, like 1901. A few files from the Better Gmail Firefox extension were like that.

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