find has good support for finding files the more modified less than X days ago, but how can I use find to locate all files modified before a certain date?
I can't find anything in the find man page to do this, only to compare against another files time or to check for differences between created time and now. Is making a file with the desired time and comparing against that the only way to do this?
No, you can use a date/time string.
From man find:
-newerXY reference
Compares the timestamp of the current file with reference. The reference argument is normally the name of a file (and one of its timestamps is used for the comparison) but it may also be a string describing an absolute time. X and Y are placeholders for other letters, and these letters select which time belonging to how reference is used for the comparison.a The access time of the file reference B The birth time of the file reference c The inode status change time of reference m The modification time of the file reference t reference is interpreted directly as a time
Example:
find -newermt "mar 03, 2010" -ls
find -newermt yesterday -ls
find -newermt "mar 03, 2010 09:00" -not -newermt "mar 11, 2010" -ls
Not directly related to question, but might be interesting for some that stumble here.
find command doesn't directly support -older parameter for finding files older than some required date, but you can use negate statement (using accepted answer example):
touch -t 201003160120 some_file
find . ! -newer some_file
will return files older than provided date.
If you have only '-newer file' then you can use this workaround:
# create 'some_file' having a creation date of 16 Mar 2010:
touch -t 201003160120 some_file
find all files created after this date
find . -newer some_file
man touch:
-t STAMP
use [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] instead of current time
Assuming that your touch has this option (mine is touch 5.97).
find <dir> -mtime -20
this find command will find files modified within the last 20 days.
You acan add additional limitations like:
find <dir> -mtime -20 -name "*.txt"
the same as before, but only finds files ending with '.txt'.
Just to add on - you may even use two newermt arguments to search in a time interval:
find ! -newermt "apr 01 2007" -newermt "mar 01 2007" -ls
to find all files from march 2007.
find ! -newermt “<DATE>”
like this:
find ! -newermt “jan 01 2015”
This will give you files older than 01-01-2015 in your current directory.
find <dir> -mtime +20
Is the correct answer to this question (find files modified before the last 20 days).
i hope this will help you
# find files modified last 2 days
find <directory> -type f -mtime -2
find files modifies BEFORE last 2 days (add the negative char !)
find <directory> -type f ! -mtime -2
You can pipe whith xargs ls -trdlh to list you files
find <directory> -type f ! -mtime -2 | xargs ls -trdlh
You could use a script like this
#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -ne 1 ];then
when="today"
else
when=` date -d "$1" +"%s" `
fi
now=`date +"%s"`
seconds=`echo "$when - $now" | bc`
minutes=`echo "$seconds / 60 " | bc `
find . -cmin $minutes -print
Save it in your $PATH as "newerthan" and make it executable.
Then you can find file modified after a certain date like this:
newerthan "2010-03-10"
or
newerthan "last year"
or
newerthan "yesterday"
That should do what you want. I don't think there is a built in way to achieve this otherwise.
If you search for files created before today
TODAYMIDNIGHT=$(date --date '1 day ago' +"%Y-%m-%d 23:59:59")
find . -type f -not -newermt "$TODAYMIDNIGHT"
if your date is formatted such that its ok for comparison,
mydate=201003160120
find . -type f -printf "%AY%Am%Ad%AH%AM%AS/:%p\n" | awk -vd="$mydate" -F'/:' '$1 > d{ print $2 }'
