Bsrgvty

In Ubuntu 16.04, how can I resort files in a folder? It seems I must choose name or last modified. I tried renaming to change when modified, but was left with original date.The files are a mix of .txt, .eml and .odt. I would like the files listed in another order. When I made a change to the name, the time last modified remained the same. I don't know how to modify some non-text files. I am not tech-savvy and don't know the right words for much of this. I appreciate your patience. Any help is much appreciated.

Simply renaming a file would not change its timestamp (modification date), you need to either make an actual change to the content of the file itself or use the touch command to change the modification date.

Run following command in Terminal

touch /path/to/file

to change the modification date of the file to current time. For example for a file named sample-file in your Documents folder, run

touch ~/Documents/sample-file

Although you can sort files in Nautilus (the File Manager) you get more options when using the ls (list files and directories (not Lost Saloon)) command and changing the parameters passed to it.

A brief summary from the LostSaloon: how to sort the output of ‘ls command’ in linux command line

• 
  ls -1 (yes that is a one not an L). Sort by name


• 
  ls -1r sort by name in reverse order


• 
  ls -lr --group-directories-first Sort by name in reverse order with directories listed first (they usually appear in blue text)


• 
  ls -t sort by date last modified


• 
  ls -S sort by file size (largest to smallest)


• 
  ls -S sort by file size (smallest to largest)


• 
  ls -X sort by extension

For even more power pipe ls output (send output) to the sort command. For example to sort files on owner user ID:

ls -l | sort -k 3

Whilst answering this question I found something interesting:

$ ls -laSr
total 2216
-rw-r--r-- 1 rick rick 0 Aug 3 2018 .sudo_as_admin_successful
-rw-r----- 1 rick rick 0 Apr 16 17:14 .gksu.lock
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rick rick 0 Aug 23 2018 File A
(... SNIP ...)
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rick rick 143383 Sep 30 2018 dbus-monitor-plugin.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rick rick 147247 Sep 30 2018 dbus-monitor-lid-close.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rick rick 177948 Oct 16 2018 java_error_in_STUDIO_9901.log
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 350821 Dec 17 18:04 trace89.dat.gz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 rick rick 20000000000 Apr 7 19:50 foo

I must have used the sudo command that created the file:

-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 350821 Dec 17 18:04 trace89.dat.gz

One must be careful with sudo because it can change the owner of files in a regular user's directory. This happened here but this particular file is of little concern.

I must have forgot an experiment that created an extraordinary large file. I should have deleted this file:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 rick rick 20000000000 Apr 7 19:50 foo