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Howto find files newer than a specific date using command line

Posted At : May 10, 2010 1:19 PM

While doing some server admin tasks the other day I needed to find all the files newer than a certain date. Using just the command line tools it was relatively simple but not obvious, so this is a not to self.

The find utility has an option to find a file newer than another file. By creating and empty file with a specific creation date we can do the search:

touch timestamp -d 2010-01-01

To show all files newer than 2010-01-01 use:

find . -newer timestamp

Or to create a tar archive of them use xargs like so:

find . -newer timestamp | xargs tar -rf /root/filesnewerthan-2010-01-01.tar

Easy. Mark

Posted in: HOWTO, Linux, Open Source, Systems admin, Ubuntu

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