Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,
In need to write a bash script which will be run periodically to check the files in a target directory. This receives files on an ad hoc basis and the script need to compare the time stamp of the latest file received with system time and write a message to the server log file if the time difference is greater than 10 minutes.

I was thinking of these steps:

1. ls -lt > local_filename1
2. head -1 filename1 > filename2
3. cut -d ' ' -f <column containing timestamp info> filename2 > filename3
4. pass filename3 to the date commnd to return just the time element
5. convert output of step (4) to milliseconds and compare with server time
6. write message to application log file of the time difference is > 10 minutes

Could anybody offer an alternative to the above cumbersome solution.

Thanks for any help.

Why are you running ls -l if you don't want the long-style output? Leave off the -l and you won't have to throw off all the other columns.

Since you have bash I'm presuming you have linux, which makes things a lot easier:

Code:

MOSTRECENT=$(ls -t | head -n 1)
# Current epoch time in seconds
CURTIME=$(date +%s)
# Modification time in epoch seconds
MTIME=$(stat -c %Y "${MOSTRECENT}")

if [[ $((CURTIME-MTIME)) -gt $((60*10)) ]]
then
        echo "File $MOSTRECENT is older than 10 minutes"
fi

Thanks for the fast reply.