Here you go: sort all files in the current directory by modification time, whitespace-in-filenames-safe. The `printf (od -> sed)' construction converts back ou

Here you go: sort all files in the current directory by modification time, whitespace-in-filenames-safe. The `printf (od -> sed)' construction converts back out of null-separated characters into newline-separated, though feel free to replace that with anything accepting null-separated input. Granted, `sort --zero-terminated' is a GNU extension and kinda cheating, but it's even available on macOS so it's probably fine. printf '%b' $( find . -maxdepth 1 -exec sh -c ' printf '\''%s %s\0'\'' "$(stat -f '\''%m'\'' "$1")" "$1" ' sh {} \; | \ sort --zero-terminated | \ od -v -b | \ sed 's/^[^ ]*// s/ *$// s/ */ \\/g s/\\000/\\012/g') If you're running this under zsh, you'll need to prefix it with `command' to use the system executable: zsh's builtin printf doesn't support printing octal escape codes for normally printable characters, and you may have to assign the output to a variable and explicitly word-split it. This is all POSIX as far as I know, except for the sort.