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

Question

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

Answer 1

As pointed out by Max, you can't, but checking files modified or accessed is not all that hard. I wrote a tutorial about this, as late as today. The essence of which is to use -newerXY and ! -newerXY:

Example: To find all files modified on the 7th of June, 2007:

$ find . -type f -newermt 2007-06-07 ! -newermt 2007-06-08

To find all files accessed on the 29th of september, 2008:

$ find . -type f -newerat 2008-09-29 ! -newerat 2008-09-30

Or, files which had their permission changed on the same day:

$ find . -type f -newerct 2008-09-29 ! -newerct 2008-09-30

If you don't change permissions on the file, 'c' would normally correspond to the creation date, though.

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

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!

Answer 6

@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.

Answer 7

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

Answer 8

cp `ls -ltr | grep 'Jun 14' | perl -wne 's/^.*\s+(\S+)$/$1/; print $1 . "\n";'` /some_destination_dir

Answer 9

I found this scriplet in a script that deletes all files older than 14 days:

CNT=0
for i in $(find -type f -ctime +14); do
  ((CNT = CNT + 1))
  echo -n "." >> $PROGRESS
  rm -f $i
done
echo deleted $CNT files, done at $(date "+%H:%M:%S") >> $LOG

I think a little additional "man find" and looking for the -ctime / -atime etc. parameters will help you here.