Yes, you can include the option(s) to find that allow you to sort alphabetically, numerically, chronologically, etc. Example, you may be looking for files between 45 days and 90 days and you want them sorted chronologically;

Code:

find . -mtime +45 -mtime -90 -type f -exec ls -lart {} \;

(assuming you are already in the cwd and you do not have too many files that forces you to use xargs)

The 'ls -lart' will sort chronologically (date) in ascending order.

From the list that is generated you can execute the 'touch' command, or the 'cp' command, or the 'mv' command, or the 'tr' command, etc. Using the example from above;

Code:

find . -mtime +45 -mtime -90 -type f -exec ls -rt {} \; | while read line
do
<your commands>
done

Find type files that are between 45 and 90 days old (that would be mtime - when the file was last modified) and sort them by date in ascending order (if you leave off the 'la' from 'ls -lart' you are left with 'ls -rt' - you will not see the perms and dates but it is still sorting). The resulting files are then piped through a while loop and each line is read individually and that allows you to act on each line depending on some condition, i.e., the date. The <your commands> can be your touch command, acting on each line that is produced from the output of the find command.

As I mentioned above, if you have too many files you will need to use the xargs with your find command.

The find command by itself will do just that, find what you are looking for. Options added to the find command allow you to find files/directories based on some conditional, the "-mtime" or "-type" for example. Using the "-depth" option with find will allow you to find . files (hidden) as well.

The find command can be very simple or it can be very complex; you could have it sort, convert upper to lower, reverse the file names, etc. It's what you include with the find command that allows you to be choosy.

Almost always, there is more than 1 way to do things in UNIX/Linux. You may find another way to do what you want that we did not list here. And that is usually good, you are thinking instead of just copying what we said.

You may choose to use a perl 1 liner to identify and select the files you want.

Code:

find . -depth | perl -lne 'print if /1st date/ && /2nd date/ &&

and so on ...