UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hi,

I need to delete the last N days file using find.
I am trying to use

find . -mtime -10 -print

which lists down required files.
but when i use

find . -mtime -10 -exec ls -lrt {} \;

it gives me all files in the directory including the required files but the required files are having ./ preceded with them.

Now when I tried
find . -name '*.txt' -mtime -10 -exec ls -lrt {} \;

It gave me proper output i.e. only required .txt files.
But i want to check for all the files in that directory and not just .txt files.
Can someone please help me out and let me know why -exec is responding differently and how can i achieve what i need to get?

Thanks
Vikas

Of course it prepends ./

That's the folder you told it to look inside, .

These are completely valid paths.

If you wanted absolute paths, give find /path/to/folder/ instead of .

Thanks but I am not looking for absolute path. I want to know why
find . -name '*.txt' -mtime -10 -exec ls -lrt {} \; and
find . -mtime -10 -exec ls -lrt {} \; are giving different results? Is specifying -name is mandatory or is there anyway i can get similar results from find . -mtime -10 -exec ls -lrt {} \;

The first will only list files. The second lists directories, as well, making the results very different, because 'ls folder' will list a folder's contents, not its name. This means your second version not only has different files listed different ways -- it also prints some duplicates!

Do you even need ls -lrt? Why not leave off the -exec entirely let find print by itself? It prints files by default. That way you don't have to worry about what ls is doing to the files.

If you are only interested in files, not directories (or other types of inode) you need to specify "-type f".

Code:

find . -type f -mtime -10 -print

To stop "ls" expanding any directories it finds, use the "-d" switch to "ls".

Code:

find . -mtime -10 -exec ls -lad {} \;

Code:

find . -type f -mtime -10 -exec ls -lad {} \;

Thanks Corona688 for useful information which explains why i am getting different outputs.

Thanks Methyl, including type -f resolved my problem and now I could see desired results.

The first would also list any directory that happened to have been created with .txt on the end.