What's the best way of telling Kaffeine to play in random order the 15 newest files in a directory in linux?

I want to be able to use kaffeine or another media player to randomly play an arbitrary number of the newest files in a particular directory. Preferably with as little typing as possible, and I am not opposed to using a script or an alias. I figure there's some way I can use head and ls -1 or some other parameter to create a list that I can pass to kaffeine (mplayer, dragon player, etc) as a parameter. I'm using bash on Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope if it makes any difference.

1 Answer

Here is a function to create the file list:

function newest () { find . -type f -printf "%T@ %f\n" | sort -n | tail -n ${1:-15} | cut -f 2 -d " " | sort -R } 

It defaults to 15 files, but accepts a parameter for a different number. The last sort puts the list in random order.

For mplayer, you should be able to do:

mplayer $(newest 10) 

or

mplayer <(newest 10) 

Note that mplayer has a -shuffle option.