Find files in linux by date modified

Find the files that have been changed in last 24 hours

E.g., a MySQL server is running on my Ubuntu machine. Some data has been changed during the last 24 hours. What (Linux) scripts can find the files that have been changed during the last 24 hours? Please list the file names, file sizes, and modified time.

7 Answers 7

To find all files modified in the last 24 hours (last full day) in a particular specific directory and its sub-directories:

find /directory_path -mtime -1 -ls 

The — before 1 is important — it means anything changed one day or less ago. A + before 1 would instead mean anything changed at least one day ago, while having nothing before the 1 would have meant it was changed exacted one day ago, no more, no less.

The argument to -mtime is interpreted as the number of whole days in the age of the file. -mtime +n means strictly greater than, -mtime -n means strictly less than.

Another, more humanist way, is to use -newermt option which understands human-readable time units (see man find and search for -newerXY ).

Unlike -mtime option which requires the user to read find documentation to figure our what time units -mtime expects and then having the user to convert its time units into those, which is error-prone and plain user-unfriendly. -mtime was barely acceptable in 1980s, but in the 21st century -mtime has the convenience and safety of stone age tools.

Example uses of -newermt option with the same duration expressed in different human-friendly units:

find / -newermt "-24 hours" -ls find / -newermt "1 day ago" -ls find / -newermt "yesterday" -ls 

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How to Find Last Modified Files in Linux?

This tutorial explains how to find last modified files in Linux using different commands and according to custom needs.

After reading this tutorial you’ll know how to execute the following tasks:

• How to find files modified in a specific day range
• How to find last modified specific file type (e.g mp4, png)
• Finding files modified before / after X minutes
• How to find files modified in a specific date
• Finding modified files recursively
• Search omitting files or directories
• Find files by access date

Finding last day modified files in Linux:

To start, let’s search files modified less than a day ago. To find files modified a day ago you can use the commands find and newermt used in the following example.

The find command is used to search files. The newermt command compares files timestamp with the argument passed, in this case “1 day ago”. Then, the ls command is passed to list the files.

To find last day modified files, you can also use the mtime command together with find. By specifying the option 0 as in the example below, mtime will return all files modified in the last 24 hours.

Find Last Modified Specific File Type in Linux:

You can use a wildcard to limit your search to a specific file type. In the following example, find and newermt are instructed to list all mp4 files modified a day ago.

cc lang=”bash” width=”100%” height=”100%” escaped=”true” theme=”blackboard”]$ find /home/linuxhint/*.mp4 -newermt “1 day ago” -ls[/cc

In the following example, find and newermt are used to find all .png images less than 15 days old.

Finding Last Hour Modified Files in Linux:

The following example combines the find command with the mmin command. We can use the mmin command to specify minutes. In the example below, the find and mmin commands will print all files under the /root directory, whose modifications are less than 60 minutes old.

Contrary to the previous example in which files modified in the past 60 minutes were found. You can also use +mmin to search files modified after X minutes. For example, the following command will show files modified 60 minutes ago or more.

Finding Files Modified on a Specific Date in Linux:

You can use the ls command to list files including their modification date by adding the -lt flag as shown in the example below. The flag -l is used to format the output as a log. The flag -t is used to list last modified files, newer first.

Then you can combine ls -lt with grep to print all files which were modified on a specific date.

Find Last Modified Files Recursively:

Previous examples are useful to find last modified files

The command below can be used to print last modified files recursively.

Search File by Date Omitting Files or Directories:

Contrary to the previous example, you can search files omitting directories. For this purpose, you need to implement the -type flag with the option f (file) as shown in the following example. As a result, you’ll see only final files and no directories.

You can also search directories only and the output will omit files. For this, just replace the f with a d after the -type flag.

Find Files by Access Date:

You also may want to find unmodified files by access date. For this purpose, you can use the atime command. It is similar to the mtime command explained before, but instead of identifying files by modification, it can display files by access. With this command you can learn the last accessed files and directories in the system.

The following command shows all files accessed in the past 10 days.

Like the previous command, you can also use the d option to show only directories:

If you don’t specify a type, atime will show all files and directories:

In the following example, find and atime are used to find files and directories with modification older than 20 days.

As with previous examples, you can also limit the listing to files or directories with the -type flag.

Conclusion:

As you can see, Linux offers different methods to find files according to modification time. Any Linux user level can easily learn those methods to search files with a single command. Finding files by modification or access within a system is part of the basic knowledge a Linux user needs.

I hope this tutorial was useful. Keep following Linux Hint for more Linux tips and tutorials.

About the author

David Adams

David Adams is a System Admin and writer that is focused on open source technologies, security software, and computer systems.

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finding files in unix based on creation/modification date

How to find files on a unix server which were created/modified in previous month? for ex. If the current month is Jul then the list of files which were created/modified in Jun should get displayed.

No common file system records the creation date of a file. You have access to last modification time, last access time, and last change time (last time metadata for the file changed.)

I would use find and look at the -amin -anewer -atime -cmin -cnewer -ctime -mmin -mtime options for possible options. And see Williams comment about the creation time not being persisted.

Linux ext4 records creation date, and FreeBSD’s native filesystem does too. They’re not easy to get at though, since most tools and scripting languages don’t know about them.

3 Answers 3

One way is to execute that command.

• ls -laR | grep monthName where montName could be Jan,Feb,Mar, and so on . (remember to change working directory to directory that you’re interested in. Also notice that this method is recursive so all sub-directories will be inspected

With this you also retrieve all file permission and so on.

I’m sure that will be better ways (if them jump into my mind, I’ll edit this post) but since I’m in coffee break, this is the faster that I find.

In order to find files modified in the previous month, you will need to use find with a set range, for example:

cd / (if you are wanting to start from the root) find . -type f -mtime +26d -mtime -56d -print 

You should adjust your range to include the dates that you wish to include.

monthToFind=`date -d "1 months ago" "+%Y-%m"` find . -printf "%TY-%Tm %p\n" | egrep "^$monthToFind " | sed "s/^$monthToFind //g" 

This will be slower than using a time range in find. But the time range is hard to determine, and quickly becomes invalid, possibly even while the command is executing.

Unfortunately this will miss files modified last month when they were also modified this month. I don’t know of a way to determine these files.

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Find the latest file by modified date

If I want to find the latest file (mtime) in a (big) directory containing subdirectories, how would I do it? Lots of posts I’ve found suggest some variation of ls -lt | head (amusingly, many suggest ls -ltr | tail which is the same but less efficient) which is fine unless you have subdirectories (I do). Then again, you could

find . -type f -exec ls -lt \ \+ | head 

which will definitely do the trick for as many files as can be specified by one command, i.e. if you have a big directory, -exec. \+ will issue separate commands; therefore each group will be sorted by ls within itself but not over the total set; the head will therefore pick up the lastest entry of the first batch. Any answers?

6 Answers 6

You do not need to recur to external commands (as ls ) because find can do all you need through the -printf action:

find /path -printf '%T+ %p\n' | sort -r | head 

Yeah, I came up with find . -type f -exec stat —format=%y \ \+ | sort -r | head -n1 but your solution is far cleaner!

You can also cull the output of head to include a certain number of lines. I only needed the first line, so I used head -n 1

@qwr wrote «Append | cut -d ‘ ‘ -f2 to get filename only». Thanks! Although better append | cut -d ‘ ‘ -f2 — to avoid problems with filenames that contain spaces.

I had a similar problem today, but I attacked it without find . I needed something short I could run over ssh to return the most recently edited file in my home directory. This is roughly what I came up with:

The -p option to ls adds a trailing slash to directories, the grep -v removes lines ending in a slash (aka, all directories), and the head -1 limits the output to a single file.

This is much less verbose than using find if all you want to return is the file name.

This is on my system faster than printf , though I don’t understand why

find /path -type f -exec stat -c "%y %n" <> + | sort -r | head 

EDIT: I guess this post is not ‘not particularly useful’ as I thought it was. This is a really fast solution that just keeps track of the most recently modified file (instead of sorting the entire list of files):

Spread over multiple lines for clarity it looks as follows:

find . -type f -printf '%T@ %p\n' | awk ' BEGIN < mostrecenttime = 0; mostrecentline = "nothing"; > < if ($1 >mostrecenttime) < mostrecenttime = $1; mostrecentline = $0; >> END < print mostrecentline; >' | cut -f2- -d ' ' 

Not a particularly useful post but since ‘arrange’ was discussing speed, I thought I’d share this.

arrange’s and enzotib’s solutions involve listing all files inside the directory with their mtimes and then sorting. As you know sorting is not necessary to find the maximum. Finding maximum can be done in linear time but sorting takes n log(n) time [I know the difference isn’t much, but still ;)]. I can’t think of a neat way of implementing this. [EDIT: A neat (albeit dirty looking) and fast implementation provided above.]

Next best thing — To find the most recently edited file in a directory, recursively find the most recently edited file in each level 1 subdirectory. Let this file represent the subdirectory. Now sort the level 1 files along with the representatives of the level 1 subdirectories. If the number of number of level 1 files and sub-dirs of each directory is nearly a constant, then this process should scale linearly with total number of files.

This is what I came up with to implement this:

findrecent() < < find "$1" -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec stat -c "%y %n" <>+ | sort -r | head -1 && find "$1" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec findrecent <> \;; > | sort -r | head -1; > findrecent . 

I ran this and got a bunch of find: findrecent: No such file or directory errors. Reason: -exec of find runs in a different shell. I tried defining findrecent in .bashrc, .xsessionrc but these didn’t help [I’d appreciate help here]. In the end I resorted to putting

#!/bin/bash < find "$1" -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec stat -c "%y %n" <>+ | sort -r | head -1 && find "$1" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec findrecent <> \;; > | sort -r | head -1; 

in a script called findrecent in my PATH and then running it.

I ran this, kept waiting and waiting with no output. Just to be sure I wasn’t dealing with any infinite loops I modified the file to

#!/bin/bash echo "$1" >&2 < find "$1" -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec stat -c "%y %n" <>+ | sort -r | head -1 && find "$1" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec findrecent <> \;; > | sort -r | head -1; 

and tried again. It did work — but took 1 minute 35 seconds on my homefolder — arrange’s and enzotib’s solutions took 1.69, 1.95 seconds respectively!

So much for O(n)’s superiority over O(n log (n))! Damn you function call overhead! [Or rather script call overhead]

But this script does scale better than the earlier solutions and I bet it’ll run faster than them on google’s memory bank ;D

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