behavior of find utility's -mtime -7 primary Post: 302967536

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting behavior of find utility's -mtime -7 primary Post 302967536 by Don Cragun on Wednesday 24th of February 2016 03:29:46 PM

02-24-2016

Registered User

Quote:

Originally Posted by Super123

Thanks. I am new user. I am learning. I couldn't find a way to create a new topic.
I know -mtime -7 means less than 7 days old, but there is a ! which actually inverts the sign. This is weird. But that's the way someone wrote that code in my organization few years back.
Thanks again.

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Sorry, I didn't notice the ! in ! -mtime -7. That would mean 7 or more days old (not just 7 days old) which could also be written as -mtime +6.

The standards state:

Quote:

If a file is removed from or added to the directory hierarchy being searched it is unspecified whether or not find includes that file in its search.

but that does not give an implementation the right to include a new file in the search and ignore the selection criteria. The behavior you're describing sounds like a bug in find on your system.

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