Kubernetes sort pods by age

Question

I can sort my Kubernetes pods by name using:

kubectl get pods --sort-by=.metadata.name

How can I sort them (or other resoures) by age using kubectl?

Answer 1

Pods have status, which you can use to find out startTime.

I guess something like kubectl get po --sort-by=.status.startTime should work.

You could also try:

1. kubectl get po --sort-by='{.firstTimestamp}'.
2. kubectl get pods --sort-by=.metadata.creationTimestamp Thanks @chris

Also apparently in Kubernetes 1.7 release, sort-by is broken.

https://github.com/kubernetes/kubectl/issues/43

Here's the bug report : https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/48602

Here's the PR: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/48659/files

Answer 2

kubectl get pods --sort-by=.metadata.creationTimestamp

Answer 3

If you are trying to get the most recently created pod you can do the following

kubectl get pods --sort-by=.metadata.creationTimestamp -o jsonpath='{.items[-1:].metadata.name}'

Note the -1: gets the last item in the list, then we return the pod name

Answer 4

If you want to sort them in reverse order based on the age:

kubectl get po --sort-by=.metadata.creationTimestamp -n <<namespace>> | tac

Answer 5

If you want just the name of most-recently-created pod;

POD_NAME=$(kubectl get pod --sort-by=.metadata.creationTimestamp -o name | cut -d/ -f2 | tail -n 1)
echo "${POD_NAME}"

Answer 6

I wanted to see all pods that were updated in the past 24 hours. This worked perfectly well and doesn't rely on a particular version of Kubernetes or Kubernetes advanced parameters besides get pods:

kubectl get pods | awk '{print $1 " : " $5}' | grep -E ':\s([1-9]|[12][0-4])h$' | sort -k3,3