List recently modified files under a directory in linux shell

In order to list files that have been modified recently, we could use the find command to retrieve the file information and sort them by modified date:

find . -type f -exec stat --format '%Y :%y %n' {} \; | sort -nr | cut -d: -f2- | head

However, this will miss some folders if the folders are symoblic links. So in this case we could specify find to follow symbolic links.

find -L . -type f -exec stat --format '%Y :%y %n' {} \; | sort -nr | cut -d: -f2- | head

Fourther more, if you just want to get files modified in last a few days, it's build in in find:

find . -mtime n

list files that modified n*24 hours ago.