Shell Programming and Scripting

Well,
DELFILE_1=abc1.txt.$DATE1*
can have a variety of effects depending on whether or not any files in the current directory happen to match the pattern. If they do, the pattern will be replaced with the list of matching filenames. So you might want to make sure that you are in the same directory as the script when you run the above command.

But of course, if this had been the problem, it would have been exposed when you followed my advice:
"geomonap, do stuff like:
echo DELFILE_2= $DELFILE_2
just before your find statement so you can see what is happening."
so that can't be it. And so I'm not sure what to tell you.

Should have been more specific. +n means files that are n+1 days old or older.

2 days and 1 second is more than 2 days. The file does not need to be a full 3 days old to match -mtime +2.

I have a question then! What will '-mtime 0', '-mtime +0' and '-mtime -1' give? Will the last two be the same?

I have used '-mtime +0' to find files older than 24 hours. By that reckoning, I should get files older than 48 hours with '-mtime +1', and files older than 72 hours with '-mtime +2'.

P.S. I am using hours here to avoid confusion with 'days'. Since we think of a day as time from 00:00 to 23:59, it can be a bit confusing.

Using -mtime +0 and -mtime -1 would not be the same

-mtime 0 - would display files for which 24 hrs is not completed (exactly 0 days -- so it should be less than 24 hrs)

-mtime +0 - would display all the files (more than 0 days --- all the files timestamp would fall under this )

-mtime -1 - would display files for which 24 hrs is not completed ( less than 1 day -- so less than 24 hrs )

using -mtime 0 and -mtime -1 would give the same listing

Actually, according to posix, we are all wrong.

By this definition:

Code:

0 days in seconds:       0  -   86399
1 day in seconds:    86400  -  172799
2 days in seconds:  172800  -  259159

This means that "-mtime 0" and "-mtime -1" would be the same and this is the only pair of specs that should behave identically.

Note that "find" can take a while to run, so you measure based on when "find" started. This means that if a file was created several seconds after find started, it should match "-mtime -0".

I'm not sure that all versions of find adhere strickly to this definition of time. I guess I'll do some testing.