Reading text file with latest time stamp in Python

Question

I have a small program through which I am trying to read log files generated in a file location like below

Error_Suspects = ['Error', 'ERROR', 'Failed', 'Failure']


def detect_suspects(file_path, word_list):
    with open(file_path) as LogFile:
        Summary = {word: [] for word in word_list}
        failure = ':'
        for num, line in enumerate(LogFile, start=1):
            for word in word_list:
                if word in line:
                    failure += '<li>' + line + '</li>'
    return failure


Result = detect_suspects(r'C:\scripts\Log.txt', Error_Suspects)

now the issue is this was good until I have only one single file. But now the files are generated at a certain interval with the timestamp as below.

I want to modify the above program in such a way so that it should always check the file with the latest time stamp. Also, I want to loop this program to run every 5 mins to check for the latest file. If new file doesn't arrive within 5 min it should not read the old one (which is already been read)

Answer 1

If you're in the directory containing all those files, you can use os.path.getmtime to get the latest file.

You'd use it like this:

import os
files = os.listdir('.')
latest_file = max(files, key=os.path.getmtime)

os.listdir returns a list of all files in the current directory. max with the key finds the file with the most recent modification time, and returns it.

---

To loop over your directory every 5 minutes, you'll need to instate a while loop:

import time
while True:
    Result = detect_suspects(r'C:\scripts\Log.txt', Error_Suspects)
    time.sleep(5 * 60) # 300 seconds or 5 minutes