Find files by access, modification date under Linux or UNIX

Posted by Vivek Gite [Last updated: January 18, 2007]

Q. I don't remember where I saved pdf and text files under Linux. I have downloaded files from internet a few months ago. How do I find my pdf files?

A. You need to use find command. Each file has three time stamps, which record the last time that certain operations were performed on the file:
[a] access (read the file's contents) - atime

[b] change the status (modify the file or its attributes) - ctime

[c] modify (change the file's contents) - mtime

You can search for files whose time stamps are within a certain age range, or compare them to other time stamps.

You can use -mtime option. It returns list of file if the file was last accessed N*24 hours ago. For example to find file in last 2 months (60 days) you need to use -mtime +60 option.

-mtime +60 means you are looking for a file modified 60 days ago.
-mtime -60 means less than 60 days.
-mtime 60 If you skip + or - it means exactly 60 days.

So to find text files that were last modified 60 days ago, use
$ find /home/you -iname "*.txt" -mtime -60 -print

Display content of file on screen that were last modified 60 days ago, use
$ find /home/you -iname "*.txt" -mtime -60 -exec cat {} \;

Count total number of files using wc command
$ find /home/you -iname "*.txt" -mtime -60 | wc -l

You can also use access time to find out pdf files. Following command will print the list of all pdf file that were accessed in last 60 days:
$ find /home/you -iname "*.pdf" -atime -60 -type -f

List all mp3s that were accessed exactly 10 days ago:
$ find /home/you -iname "*.mp3" -atime 10 -type -f

There is also an option called -daystart. It measure times from the beginning of today rather than from 24 hours ago. So, to list the all mp3s in your home directory that were accessed yesterday, type the command
$ find /home/you -iname "*.mp3" -daystart -type f -mtime 1

Where,