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Full Discussion: mtime, ctime, and atime
Top Forums UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers Answers to Frequently Asked Questions Tips and Tutorials mtime, ctime, and atime Post 302101136 by Perderabo on Thursday 28th of December 2006 03:43:51 AM
Old 12-28-2006
find command -mtime -ctime -atime

The find command uses arguments like:
-mtime -2
-mtime +2
-mtime 2

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:
Code:
0 days in seconds:       0  -   86399
1 day in seconds:    86400  -  172799
2 days in seconds:  172800  -  259159

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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Net::SFTP::Foreign::Attributes(3pm)			User Contributed Perl Documentation		       Net::SFTP::Foreign::Attributes(3pm)

NAME
Net::SFTP::Foreign::Attributes - File/directory attribute container SYNOPSIS
use Net::SFTP::Foreign; my $a1 = Net::SFTP::Foreign::Attributes->new(); $a1->set_size($size); $a1->set_ugid($uid, $gid); my $a2 = $sftp->stat($file) or die "remote stat command failed: ".$sftp->status; my $size = $a2->size; my $mtime = $a2->mtime; DESCRIPTION
Net::SFTP::Foreign::Attributes encapsulates file/directory attributes for Net::SFTP::Foreign. It also provides serialization and deserialization methods to encode/decode attributes into Net::SFTP::Foreign::Buffer objects. USAGE
Net::SFTP::Foreign::Attributes->new() Returns a new "Net::SFTP::Foreign::Attributes" object. Net::SFTP::Foreign::Attributes->new_from_buffer($buffer) Creates a new attributes object and populates it with information read from $buffer. $attrs->as_buffer Serializes the Attributes object $attrs into a buffer object. $attrs->flags returns the value of the flags field. $attrs->size returns the values of the size field or undef if it is not set. $attrs->uid returns the value of the uid field or undef if it is not set. $attrs->gid returns the value of the gid field or undef if it is not set. $attrs->perm returns the value of the permissions field or undef if it is not set. See also "stat" in perlfunc for instructions on how to process the returned value with the Fcntl module. For instance, the following code checks if some attributes object corresponds to a directory: use Fctnl qw(S_ISDIR); ... if (S_ISDIR($attr->perm)) { # it is a directory! } $attrs->atime returns the value of the atime field or undef if it is not set. $attrs->mtime returns the value of the mtime field or undef if it is not set. %extended = $attr->extended returns the vendor-dependent extended attributes $attrs->set_size($size) sets the value of the size field, or if $size is undef removes the field. The flags field is adjusted accordingly. $attrs->set_perm($perm) sets the value of the permsissions field or removes it if the value is undefined. The flags field is also adjusted. $attr->set_ugid($uid, $gid) sets the values of the uid and gid fields, or removes them if they are undefined values. The flags field is adjusted. This pair of fields can not be set separatelly because they share the same bit on the flags field and so both have to be set or not. $attr->set_amtime($atime, $mtime) sets the values of the atime and mtime fields or remove them if they are undefined values. The flags field is also adjusted. $attr->set_extended(%extended) sets the vendor-dependent extended attributes $attr->append_extended(%more_extended) adds more pairs to the list of vendor-dependent extended attributes COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 2006-2008 Salvador Fandin~o. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. perl v5.14.2 2012-05-11 Net::SFTP::Foreign::Attributes(3pm)
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