Shell Programming and Scripting

I was trying to figure out in Korn shell but this may apply elsewhere how to generate a list of files from a directory created in the last 10 seconds or less. I have used the find command in the past with -mtime which is measured in days to get a list of files older than say 7 days for example. This is something new for me I am trying to solve and could use a guru to help. thanks.

You can use the -d option on the touch command (not POSIX) to create a file that has a time stamp that is n seconds in the past. Then run find with the -newer option to find all files newer than the dummy file.

Code:

#!/usr/bin/env ksh
touch newer-file                  # we want to find this recently created file
touch -d "10s ago" marker-file  # marker file now older than newer file

find . -newer marker-file -ls     # should present newer-file and .
rm marker-file

If you're on a system that only has a POSIX date command (no -d support), then you'll need to compute the time for the touch command as a string and use the -t option on touch. Messier, but not difficult. Check out the man page for touch if you need to do it this way.