Shell Programming and Scripting

Each time I use date +%s, the number increases.

Am I in the ballpark with this ?

Code:

file1time=`stat -c %Y /home/andy/bin/Ubuntu_Scripts.zip`

file2time=`stat -c %Y /media/andy/MAXTOR_SDB1/Ubuntu_Mate_18.04/Ubuntu_Scripts.zip`

if [ "$file1time" -ot "$file2time" ]
then
 echo "File is older. "
fi

I would not use stat. I would do it as I said, add the UNIX time to the file name.

If you want to use stat, that's up to you.

Ok. Will work on adding it in a month/day/year format.

If you convert to DMY format, will have have to write more code to instruct a computer to compare dates.

That's why UNIX time is so great.

You can easily compute with it.

On my backups, I use standard date and time format because I don't use the information to have a computer compare the dates / times.

So, I prefer human readable file names.

But if I was comparing the times using a computer, then I use UNIX time.

For example, when you logout of this forum, we set a cookie of your last login time, so when you login again, we know what posts you have not seen, based on time, etc.

This cookie stores the time in UNIX time.

That makes sense.

Use date +%Y-%m-%d format that can be alphabetically compared!

I think this will work.

Code:

rsync -av --update Ubuntu_Scripts.zip /media/andy/MAXTOR_SDB1/Ubuntu_Mate_18.04/
rsync -av --update Ubuntu_Scripts.zip /media/andy/MAXTOR_SDB5/Emergency_Backup/