Hi,

I operate and use HF radars along the California coast for ocean surface currents. The devices use Mac OS as the control and logging software. The software generates thousands of files a week and while I've used PERL in the past to solve the problems of finding files I come to realize some inherent inefficiencies with this type of search method. Ultimately I'd like to find files using the unix find command, however, my knowledge of regular expressions is in its infancy and I'm learning. So in my pursuit of this knowledge I'm turning to this forum to hopefully give me some hints.

The files fortunately are all fairly standardize -- i.e. the filename format is:

TYPE_SITE_[YY|YYYY]_MO_MD_[HHMM|HHMMSS].[xx|xxx]

where,
TYPE is a three or four character string depicting the type of data (CSS, CSQ, RDLi, STAT, etc.)
SITE is a four character string depicting the name of the radar site (GCYN, NPGS, BML1, etc.)
YYYY is a two or four digit year
MO is a two digit month
MD is a two digit month day
HH is a two digit hour
MM is a two digit minute
SS is a two digit second
xxx is a two or three character string for a file extension

The main difficulty I have is in crossing years -- i.e. if I wanted to say find CSS files for site BML1 between Dec 29th 2007 and Jan. 2nd 2008. Any advice / pointers on how to attack this using the find or grep or egrep commands would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
dpath2o

Are the files' modification date/time the same as the filename? If so, use find with the -mtime +<days> -mtime -<days> flags to set the min and max age to look between.

No unfortunately not ... File creation, access, and modification times can and often differ from the files stat ... In fact ultimately I should search for the "%TimeStamp: ..." string inside the text files to be most accurate, but once I figure this regex I think I'll be able to apply it to awk or maybe sed to read this line inside the file ... Long answer to your short question!

assuming all files end in *.xtx . Using GNUawk
output:
pls do more testing on your own

This looks GREAT!

I'm working on it, but at present I get error message:
"awk: calling undefined function mktime source line number 7"

that's a gnu awk feature.