Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi guys,

I have an interesting problem. I have looked on the forums for simular solutions but i need a differnt approach.

On an evening i have files that are created and sit in a directory, then someone will send these files on. Sometimes they forget.....

I am trying to create something that will monitor the directory for new files but the files have been there for more than an hour and alerting. I have the alerting in place, but i can't get my brain to think of a good solution.

As it is a solaris system that i can't install any packages on.... i am taking an approach of:

creating a date stamp of an hour ago
touching a file with that date stamp then doing a find and showing all files created after my touched file

Code:

DAT=`date '+%Y%m%d'$A'%M'`
echo "hi " > the.tmp
touch -t $DAT the.tmp
find /directorytofiles -type f -newer the.tmp -print -exec ls -lt {} \; | pg

now this shows all files created after the the touched files datestamp(1hour ago) but also shows files created 1 min ago (i dont want it to alert these files as they just turned up) I could run via cron every 15 mins or so.

Am i complicating things? is there a better approach? Any suggestions would be great and what would be the best idea to get it to just show the files that have turned up and not sent after an hour?

Hi guy,
I'm confused, I remeber that even solaris 'find' has some option just like "cmin amin mmin".

Code:

find /path -type f -mmin+60

You could find the files that have turned up and not sent after an hour easily.

alas not on this one, would make life soooo much easier, that is why i am forced to take a weird approach

i have -mtime -ctime -atime, those are no use at all as i think they are via days

I'm sorry to hear that, the 'find' in your OS must frustrated you..

Are you able to touch some file in the directory that you are monitoring ?
If so, you could run your script via cron every hour.
every time you run this script, you touch a mark file in that directory,
when you run this script every the next time, use

Code:

ls -t|sed '/your_mark_file_name/,$d'

This is the best method that I get now~.

I think i may need to do something like this, i was hoping not to put specific file names as i have 4 systems and they all have diff file names plus i would need to modify for new files. If i took this appraoch i may as well automate and send the files too. This Script could get a whole lot bigger lol

This thread is confusing. There is a simple way to find files of a given "age".
The basic idea is:

Code:

touch -t [min allowable time in past] dummy1   # youngest filetime to find
touch -t [ max allowable time int the past ] dummy2  # oldest filetime to find
find . -type f \( ! -newer dummy1 -a -newer dummy2 \)

Bracket around some time requirement. You can find all files 1 hour and older, say up to 5 days. This seems to be what you want.

Except the way the problem is stated the answer is not clear. At least to me.

Hah, also you could remove the previous mark file and touch a new one with the same name in the end of your script, you just need to choose a specific file name for every system~