Shell Script — Get all files modified after

Question

I\'d rather not do this in PHP so I\'m hoping a someone decent at shell scripting can help.

I need a script that runs through directory recursively and finds all fil

Answer 1

If you have GNU find, then there are a legion of relevant options. The only snag is that the interface to them is less than stellar:

• -mmin n (modification time in minutes)
• -mtime n (modification time in days)
• -newer file (modification time newer than modification time of file)
• -daystart (adjust start time from current time to start of day)
• Plus alternatives for access time and 'change' or 'create' time.

The hard part is determining the number of minutes since a time.

One option worth considering: use touch to create a file with the required modification time stamp; then use find with -newer.

touch -t 200901031231.43 /tmp/wotsit
find . -newer /tmp/wotsit -print
rm -f /tmp/wotsit

This looks for files newer than 2009-01-03T12:31:43. Clearly, in a script, /tmp/wotsit would be a name with the PID or other value to make it unique; and there'd be a trap to ensure it gets removed even if the user interrupts, and so on and so forth.