I need to copy files from a directory that has a lot of files in it. However I only want to copy them from a certain date. My thoughts so far are to use ls -l and to pipe this into awk and print out tokens 6 (month)and 7 (day).

$  ls -l
-rw-r--r--   1  prodqual   tst      681883 Jun 12 05:31 test1.txt
-rw-r--r--   1  prodqual   tst      681884 Jun 13 07:35 test2.txt
-rw-r--r--   1  prodqual   tst      681885 Jun 13 07:36 test3.txt

cp script month day outputfile

You can use find command. e.g.,

Assuming the date to be '1-Jan-2010' You could do this:

touch -t 1001011305 a # Create a dummy file with the required date time stamp (1-jan-2010)
find \( -newer a \) -exec cp {} target_dir \; # Find all files newer than the dummy file and move to target dir

I should have said that there could be newer file in the directory too that I don't want.