UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Just to be clear here. There is a very easy, very portable way to do what was requested in the 1st message in this thread on any Linux or UNIX system, but jawsnnn has ruled it out:

Code:

touch -t 201102122359.59 timestamp.$$
find directory... -newer timestamp.$$ ...
rm timestamp.$$

So within your constraints

Set some arbitrary date and then loop thru looking for new filetimes


# find files older than the first second of January 2010 - in epoch seconds
when=$(date --date="01 Jan 2010" +%s)
cd /someplace
for file in *
do
[ -d $file ] && continue
ftime=$(stat -c %X) # file time in epoch seconds
[ $ftime -le $when ] && echo $file
done > /tmp/myfilelist


I won't comment on your sysadmin. You should learn C or perl. You can write touch in 10 lines of C.

utime(2) - Linux man page

The "today -1 day" option is closest to what would help me.

As long as I know the date against which comparison needs to be done, any of the other suggested options would work (including the one with stat that I have used for now), but if I need to determine it dynamically, the date -d option should work

---------- Post updated at 10:16 AM ---------- Previous update was at 10:08 AM ----------

I just realized I can also subtract the number of seconds in an year from today's epoch second value and use that as a basis for comparison. Thanks everyone for your help.

Yes, a good example of how one's solutions are colored by the question one imagines. "How do I do date math" is too narrow a question when "how do I compare dates" is sufficient.