Would it be safer to use stat to get a known format timestamp then convert it to one that meets your requirements rather than relying on the risks by using ls and being subject to locale etc.?

Perhaps thsi would help:-

Code:

filename=/etc/profile                  # Just as an example
E_seconds=$(stat -c %Y $filename)
timestamp=$(date -d"@$E_seconds" '+%a %d %b %Y %r %p %Z')

echo "Timestamp is \"$timestamp\" for file \"$filename\""

If you build that into a loop called in by your find, that might do it.
(converting them only to display)

As for storing the values as an array, would you be better with an associative array? Have a look at the bash manual page for a description. Basically you could then map the filename to the timestamp as a pair of items keyed by filename (timestamp may not be unique)


Moving on from that, what do you plan to do with the timestamp values? if you are looking to sort them, process them, get items based on a date range, then you would be better storing them as either seconds from the Epoch or using a format such as YYYYMoDDHHMiSS so that it makes sense to numeric comparisons.

Computer code is not easy with human format dates, so one of the above could help tremendously. If you store the value as seconds, then you can display it whenever you need to by calling the date command above.



I hope that this helps,
Robin