find command

[Mike Barron_3]

I have a good question for everyone out there.

I am trying to find a way to list all files created in the last 24 hours in any given directory.

Anyone have any ideas?

[MarkSyder]

find . -mtime -1 -print

Mark Syder (like the drink but spelt different)

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

This is really impossible, in spite of what you will be told. UNIX has no creation time (except by accident) associated with any file. The inode simply does not carry that bit of metadata. The closest thing is the 'ctime' -- change time (not the same as mtime - modification). Ctime refers to the last time that the file's mode or ownership was changed (e.g. chmod). If this happens to be the time of creation then it works -- but only by accident.

About as close as you are going to get:
find . -ctime -1
but it's far from perfect.

[Mike Barron_3]

Thanks for the info. I kinda figured that would be the case. I just thought maybe someone had some trick up their sleeves.

I guess I can write a script to do a long list of all file changed within the last 24 hours and then strip away anything that isn't "new"

Thanks again.

[Sundar_7]

touch a file with timestamp of exactly 24 hours before than ur current time

# touch -mt 200403080817 ref

# ls -lrt ref
rw-rw-r-- 1 root sys 407 Mar 8 08:17 ref

# find /dir -newerc ref -exec ls -ld {} \;

The above command will list the files with the inode modification time newer than that of file ref.

but note that this goes by the inode modification time. So even if the file permission is changed (or other system calls which modifies the inode data) , it will be included in the list.

[RAC_1]

Files have three time stapms associated with them.

ll -u -- access time
ll -c -- change time
ll -t -- modification time.

Now if you create a file and do not do any changes to it, ctime is still the creation time. But once a change is done to a file, you get only chnage time. so what you can do it is create a file change it's timestamp to as 24 hrs back and use find command with -newer option.

Anil