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find is a great tool for finding files. It has the option to find files that were modified in the last X days with -mtime. However I'd like something more fine grained than that. I want to be able to find files that were modified in the last 2 hours. Is there some way to make find (or some other similar tool) do this?

Amandasaurus
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2 Answers2

11

man find

-mmin

File's data was last modified n minutes ago.

Paul
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  • also see Tometzsk'y answer to http://serverfault.com/questions/88222/find-files-modified-in-an-interval-on-unix – Paul Feb 16 '10 at 17:21
  • to be more verbose, find . -mmin -120 will find all files with an mtime within the past 2 hours – Paul Feb 16 '10 at 19:07
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An alternative to Paul Brewer's (best) answer: -newer. It essentially finds anything newer than a file. So you can use touch to create a timestamp for a file in the past, then see what's newer than that.

touch -t 201002160900 timestamp
find . -newer timestamp
Christopher Karel
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  • This trick is great when you need to find stuff modified by running a command (`touch timestamp && (some command) && find ...`) – voretaq7 Feb 16 '10 at 17:28