Question on searching files by date stamp.

[Mike_305]

Hi,

I am trying to search file in one of the directory by date stamp (for ex. Jun 12) and ll | grep -i and using sed it's not working. Any idea on how to do this.

Thanks in advance.

Mike

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi Mike:

# ls -l /pathname|grep -i "Jun 12"

...works for me. Did you double quote the token for 'grep' to match upon?

Regards!

...JRF...

[Ken Grabowski]

The statement James used will work, but there is a completely different approach you can use but may not have considered. Try:

find ./ -type f -mtime 51 -exec ls -l {} \;

It may look ugly on the surface but it is much better for finding one or more files of a specific age.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi (again) Mike:

Well, using 'find's 'mtime' argument means that you have to calculate the number of days (24-hour increments) old the target date is from now. A better way, if you want to take this approach is to create two reference points (boundries):

# touch -amt 06112359 /tmp/f1
# touch -amt 06130000 /tmp/f2
# find /pathname -xdev -type f -newer /tmp/f1 -a ! -newer /tmp/f2

This finds all *files* in '/pathname' that are newer than boundry-1 (based on modification time) and younger (not newer) than boundry-2 (file #2's modification time).

The '-xdev' switch prevents crossing mountpoints.

See the manpages for 'touch' and 'find' for more information.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Mike_305]

Hi,

I know why the ll| grep -i "Jun 1" did not work for me because the space was incorrect between "Jun & the 1" and now I know what I was doing was right. If you have any other way to search file in directory by date stamp that will be great.

For now the ll | grep -i "Jun 1" work. Any other ideas will help.

Basically I am just trying to find out how to search files in directory that has the date stamp of (for example "Jun 1").


Thanks,

Mike

[Bill Hassell]

And a very important consideration: the ll command switches to a different date format for files older than about 6 months. Then your script will completely fail. Only the find command will work for any date.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi MIke:

As Bill and I have emphasized, using 'find' is a more exact approach. For example, do you want "Jun 12" only if it is within the current 6-months or do you want any "Jun 12" from any year.

If you don't care, and you want to use 'grep', then a way to find matches for dates like "Jun1" OR "Jun1" would be:

grep "Jun[ ]*1[ ]"

Regards!

...JRF...

[Mike_305]

Thanks for all your help.

Mike