Monday, August 23, 2010

find files modified in the last X days and X hours and X mins



  find in Unix, as we know, is a command which nobody can live without. In this article, we are going to discuss only about finding the files with respect to the modification time, say files modified in the last X mins or Xhours. These can be done with the find command options available. However, in cases where the time is not a full hour, say to find files modified in the last 30hours, some Unix flavors do not have a direct option. Let us see in this article how to get these things done.

 The basic syntax of the find command is:

find path options
where path is the path to search
        and options are the options given to find command.

 In all our below examples, the path is our current directory and hence we use .(dot).

1. To find files modified in the last 5 days:
find . -mtime -5

2. To find files modified before 5 days:
find . -mtime +5
 Note: Developers, be aware. + is not default in find. If you omit the '+', it has a different meaning. It means to find files modified exactly before 5 days.

3. To find files modified in the last 40mins:
find . -mmin -40
4. To find files modified before 40mins:
find . -mmin +40
The above commands will find both files and directories modifying the criteria. If you want to find only files, use the -type option.
find . -type f -mmin -40
 This will find only the files modified in the last 40 mins, not directories.

5. By the way,  not in all Unix flavours one will find the -mmin option. If you dont have the mmin option, use the following:

   First create a dummy file whose timestamp is the time you are looking for:
touch -d "40 mins ago" temp
  The above touch command will create a temp file whose timstamp is 40mins before. For example, if the time now is 10hours 50mins, the temp file timstamp will be 10hours 40mins.

If your Unix flavor does not have the "-d" option in the touch command, you can use the following method to set the timestamp:
touch -t 1008211020 temp
   This creates a temp file whose time stamp is 2010,Aug 21, 10hours 20mins. [YYMMDDHHMM]

Second, search files which are modified after this file temp has been modified. The below command will display all the files modified after the temp has been modified OR in other words find files which are newer than temp file:
find . -newer temp
Similarly, to find files which are modified before 40 mins. In other words to negate the above search, use the exclamation:
find . ! -newer temp
  In the same way,  we can find files modified from any time we need.


6. One of the frequent requirement a sys admin gets is to find files modified before say last 2 days and 10 hours 30mins and move them to a backup directory. It can be achieved by the below commands:
#touch -d "2days 10 hours 30  mins ago" temp
#find / -type f ! -newer temp -exec mv '{}' ~/backup \;
The above example does 2 things:
a. First create a temp file whose timstamp is 2 days 10 hours and 30mins ago.
b. Finds all the files under root which are older than the temp file and moves them to the backup directory.
  The same thing using "touch -t" will be like assuming todays date is 21 Aug 2010, 15hours,45mins:

#touch -t 1008190515 temp
#find / -type f ! -newer temp -exec mv '{}' ~/backup \;
   1008190715 indicates 2010(10), Aug(08), 19th(19), 5 hours(05) and 15mins.

Happy Finding!!!

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