There are -ctime and -atime options as well. Since we now understand the differences among mtime, ctime, and atime, by understanding how find uses the -mtime option, the other two become understood as well. So I will describe find's use of the -mtime option.
As you probably know, the find command can run for minutes or hours depending on the size of the filesystem being searched. The find command makes a note of its own start time. It then looks at a file's mtime and computes how many seconds ago the file was modified. By dividing the seconds by 86,400 (and discarding any remainder), it can calculate the file's age in days:
So now that we know how many days ago a file was modified, we can use stuff like "-mtime 2" which specifies files that are 172800 to 259159 seconds older than the instant that the find command was started.
"-mtime -2" means files that are less than 2 days old, such as a file that is 0 or 1 days old.
"-mtime +2" means files that are more than 2 days old... {3, 4, 5, ...}
It may seem odd, but +0 is supposed to work and would mean files more than 0 days old. It is very important to recognize that find's concept of a "day" has nothing to do with midnight.
Last edited by Perderabo; 08-05-2007 at 12:40 PM..
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:D i have a slight problem and would appreciate if someone could clarify the confusion.. i use find alot and so far i have done ok.. but it just struck me a couple of days ago that I am not quite sure what the difference between the modification time and the change time as in ctime and mtime and... (3 Replies)
i have used all forms of the unix find command.. and right now this is the only command i can think of that might have this option..:
if i use mtime i am looking at a time interval.. but if i wanted to find out intervals of access, change and modification according to when a file changed size... (4 Replies)
Hey,
First of all I want to know How do I see the atime of a file ?? Whats the command ??
I think ls -l shows the last modified time right ? Because when I use cat to read a file, the timestamp shown by ls -l does not change.
Its not ls -lu ! man ls did not help ! How do I see the last... (8 Replies)
Hi
I've made some test with perl script to learn more about mtime...
So, my question is :
Why the mtime from findfind /usr/local/sbin -ctime -1 -mtime -1 \( -name "*.log" -o -name "*.gz" \) -print are not the same as mtime from unix/linux in ls -ltr or in stat() function in perl : stat -... (2 Replies)
hi, in trying to maintain your directories, one needs to do some housekeeping like removing old files. the tool "find" comes in handy. but how would you decide which option to use when it comes to, say, deleting files that are older than 5 days?
mtime - last modified
atime - last accessed... (4 Replies)
I need to sort through a volume that contains video files by access time and delete files that have not been accessed over x days. I have to use the access time as video files are originals that do not get modified, just read
Testing commands on a local test folder...
$ date
Wed Sep 28... (10 Replies)
Hi,
ctime is the inode change time. If reading a file, its atime will be updated, which should cause inode member i_atime changed, which is an inode change. So ctime should also be updated. But if I try to ls a directory on redhat, only the directory atime gets updated, not ctime. Why?
THANKS! (2 Replies)
It is widely documented that on zfs atime updates the access time on zfs.
Where is the access time updated on Solaris 11.2?
If I create file atimetest.txt under rpool/export/home:
# zfs list rpool/export/home
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
rpool/export/home 13.3G ... (5 Replies)