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This came up when I was doing a lot of testing of some code that does printing; I wanted to repeatedly print to PDF and view the output. But the CUPS PDF printer writes to /var/spool/cups-pdf/<username> by default, and I was naming the print jobs so they were different every time.

#!/bin/sh
echo -n $1
ls -t $1 | head -1

Usage:

xpdf `lsnewest /var/spool/cups-pdf/srutledge/`

The script should work whether you give it a directory as an argument, or if there is no argument, it will use the CWD.

An improvement would be a FUSE filesystem that "mounts" the output of any script like this onto a directory, e.g. /var/spool/cups-pdf/last. It would be useful in other ways too (a kind of "smart folders").