UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi all,

I'm wondering why this command does not work, at least, as I expect:

Code:

find . -type f -mtime +7 -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l

I expect that it list all files older than 7 days, with all information (ls -l). However it prints all files regardless of the date. Using -exec instead of '| xargs' has the same behavior.

On the other hand this command, that deletes all files older than 7 days works perfectly:

Code:

find . -type f -mtime +7 -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -f

Why 'same' command works with rm and it doesn't with ls?
Is it possible to print all information (ls -l) of files older than X days?

Thanks a lot and sorry for my english.

Albert.

Looks odd to me too - did you check it on another (similar) box?

Is "ls" and alias ?
Try the full path /usr/bin/ls .

You are right. I've just checked it in my own Ubuntu at home and it works.
I don't know which command in CentOS has the problem. It is strange thing, isn't it?

Yes, I already tried it. But it didn't work either.

Thanks both. I'll try to find out why CentOS has such strange behavior. I'll also check it in a Redhat.

Dodgy:

Code:

for i in `find . -type f -mtime +7`
do
ls -la ${i}
done

@STOIE

Assuming that the O/P Operating System is working properly, this would be better with large numbers of files or where there are files containing space characters:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
find . -type f -mtime +7 -print | sort | while read filename
do
           ls -lad "${filename}"
done

Ps: This Shell construct also works when there are no files.

Scratch this... I missed that you had the -type f option in the OP.

There's a good chance that '.' (the current directory) is also matching the search criteria (it too hasn't been updated recently) and as a result the list command for that

Code:

ls -l .

will display the current directory. An easy test would be to run the command in the directory with out the pipe and see if . is listed. Solution would be to add the -d option to ls, or use

Code:

find . -mtime +7 -ls

if that is acceptable and/or your flavour of find supports the -ls option.