¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

TIL via Adam Johnson:

Zsh: select generated files with (om[1]) glob qualifiers

[…]

In Zsh, we can avoid copying such generated filenames by using glob qualifiers, which are extra syntax you can add to filename globs in Zsh. Specifically, we want to attach the glob qualifiers om[1], which mean:

— o: sort the matches — m: by modification time, most recent first — [1]: select only the first match

Attaching these qualifiers to appropriate globs allows commands to pick up a generated file without knowing its exact name.

This is akin to ls -t | head -n 1. For example, here are both commands in the repository of this blog:

% ls -r -t content/posts/* | head -n 1
content/posts/2026-02-15-zsh-glob-qualifiers-most-recent.md

-r is --reverse, so that we get the most recent post instead of the oldest one.

Now with zsh glob qualifiers:

% ls content/posts/*.md(om[1])
content/posts/2026-02-15-zsh-glob-qualifiers-most-recent.md

You could also fetch the two most recent posts:

% ls content/posts/*.md(om[1,2])
content/posts/2026-02-13-new-blog-post-via-claude-code.md
content/posts/2026-02-15-zsh-glob-qualifiers-most-recent.md

Or perhaps only the second most recent post:

% ls content/posts/*.md(om[2])
content/posts/2026-02-13-new-blog-post-via-claude-code.md

Listing files isn’t very interesting. Here’s a more practical use case: delete the most recent file:

% rm *(om[1])

Or open the most recent file in $EDITOR:

$EDITOR content/posts/*.md(om[1])

om operates by time of last modification, but there’s also on for alphabetical sorting and oL for file size (length) sorting.

Refer to the zsh docs for more.