'How to use 'find' to search for files created on a specific date? [closed]

How do I use the UNIX command find to search for files created on a specific date?

bashunixfind


Solution 1:[1]

Use this command to search for files and folders on /home/ add a time period of time according to your needs:

find /home/ -ctime time_period

Examples of time_period:

  • More than 30 days ago: -ctime +30

  • Less than 30 days ago: -ctime -30

  • Exactly 30 days ago: -ctime 30

Solution 2:[2]

It's two steps but I like to do it this way:

First create a file with a particular date/time. In this case, the file is 2008-10-01 at midnight 

touch -t 0810010000 /tmp/t

Now we can find all files that are newer or older than the above file (going by file modified date. You can also use -anewer for accessed and -cnewer file status changed).

find / -newer /tmp/t
find / -not -newer /tmp/t

You could also look at files between certain dates by creating two files with touch

touch -t 0810010000 /tmp/t1
touch -t 0810011000 /tmp/t2

This will find files between the two dates & times

find / -newer /tmp/t1 -and -not -newer /tmp/t2

Solution 3:[3]

You could do this:

find ./ -type f -ls |grep '10 Sep'

Example: 

[root@pbx etc]# find /var/ -type f -ls | grep "Dec 24"
791235    4 -rw-r--r--   1 root     root           29 Dec 24 03:24 /var/lib/prelink/full
798227  288 -rw-r--r--   1 root     root       292323 Dec 24 23:53 /var/log/sa/sar24
797244  320 -rw-r--r--   1 root     root       321300 Dec 24 23:50 /var/log/sa/sa24

Solution 4:[4]

You can't. The -c switch tells you when the permissions were last changed, -a tests the most recent access time, and -m tests the modification time. The filesystem used by most flavors of Linux (ext3) doesn't support a "creation time" record. Sorry!

Solution 5:[5]

@Max: is right about the creation time.

However, if you want to calculate the elapsed days argument for one of the -atime, -ctime, -mtime parameters, you can use the following expression

ELAPSED_DAYS=$(( ( $(date +%s) - $(date -d '2008-09-24' +%s) ) / 60 / 60 / 24 - 1 ))

Replace "2008-09-24" with whatever date you want and ELAPSED_DAYS will be set to the number of days between then and today. (Update: subtract one from the result to align with find's date rounding.)

So, to find any file modified on September 24th, 2008, the command would be:

find . -type f -mtime $(( ( $(date +%s) - $(date -d '2008-09-24' +%s) ) / 60 / 60 / 24 - 1 ))

This will work if your version of find doesn't support the -newerXY predicates mentioned in @Arve:'s answer.

Solution 6:[6]

With the -atime, -ctime, and -mtime switches to find, you can get close to what you want to achieve.

Sources

This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 galoget
Solution 2
Solution 3 sjas
Solution 4 Max Cantor
Solution 5
Solution 6 ayaz

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