Find Files By Access, Modification Date / Time Under Linux or UNIX

by Vivek Gite on January 17, 2007 · 25 comments

I do not remember where I saved pdf and text files under Linux. I have downloaded files from the Internet a few months ago. How do I find my pdf or text files?

You need to use the 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,

  • -type f - Only search for files and not directories

-daystart option

The -daystart option is used to measure time from the beginning of the current day instead of 24 hours ago. Find out all perl (*.pl) file modified yesterday, enter:

find /nas/projects/mgmt/scripts/perl -mtime 1 -daystart -iname "*.pl"

You can also list perl files that were modified 8-10 days ago, enter:
To list all of the files in your home directory tree that were modified from two to four days ago, type:

find /nas/projects/mgmt/scripts/perl -mtime 8 -mtime -10 -daystart -iname "*.pl"

-newer option

To find files in the /nas/images directory tree that are newer than the file /tmp/foo file, enter:

find /etc -newer /tmp/foo

You can use the touch command to set date timestamp you would like to search for, and then use -newer option as follows

touch --date "2010-01-05" /tmp/foo
# Find files newer than 2010/Jan/05, in /data/images
find /data/images -newer /tmp/foo
 

Read the man page of find command for more information:
man find

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{ 25 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Alankar January 29, 2009

Suppose I want to remove a set of file frm date say 1st Jan 2009 – 20 Jan 2009 in a specific Directory.
Let me know

Reply

2 sowmya April 29, 2009

How to create a directory called Red and under that Red directory i want to create a file called Hat. How please guide me as soon as possible

Reply

3 Anonymous June 14, 2010

Please use the following command :

mkdir Red

cd Red

Red/>mkdir Hat

cd Hat

Red/Hat>

Please let me know if this is clear

Thanks,
Prashanthini

r

Reply

4 Amol April 8, 2011

mkdir Red
cd Red
touch Hat

Reply

5 Taylor December 1, 2011

mkdir -p Red/Hat

Reply

6 R Duke July 4, 2010

@sowya: to create a file ./Red/Hat when the directory “Red” doesn’t exist yet, use mkdir and touch:

mkdir Red
touch Red/Hat

Reply

7 webdesign June 26, 2009

Thx for the find examples ! they were very helpfull

Reply

8 dkalaluhi July 24, 2009

Find examples were great…needed to use this to get a report on a shared drive…getting the output was a bit of a pain, until the resident guru came through:

Finds files older than 18months and newer than 24 months, cat’s the output to a CSV in the format:
/some/path/somewhere, size in bytes, Access Time, Modified Time

find /dir/dir -type f -mtime +540 -mtime -720 -printf \”%p\”,\”%s\”,\”%AD\”,|”%TD\”\\n > /dir/dir/output.csv

works nicely, and the mem usage wasn’t bad at all, need eclipse and birt though because of

Reply

9 Matabares October 5, 2009

In aix 5.3 put -name instead -iname

Reply

10 Masonite2009 October 14, 2009

I would like to display the date modified, the owner of the file, and the file size of the files that I have found using the find command. Is there a way to do that?

Reply

11 mike October 16, 2009

the commands in the examples are not working for me, im trying to get the times a particular word file has been accessed on my computer in the last week so i tried to use the -atime example to see if it was accessed one day ago, i typed this into terminal:

find /home/you -iname “*.mp3″ -atime 01 -type -f

it didnt work, can anyone help me?

Reply

12 Amol April 8, 2011

find / -name “*.mp3″ -atime +01 -type f

use this command , it will surely work

Reply

13 ABhik February 23, 2010

@Mike – Replace ” by ‘ and try.

Reply

14 Ken May 6, 2010

I’ve got this in my delicious bookmarks and use it often, thank you. For some reason on one of my computers I have to leave the word -print off the command or I get a message about paths must precede expression. Still…thank you for the page.

Reply

15 rduke15 June 6, 2010

If you need a specific date range many days ago, it would be boring to calculate how many days ago it was exactly. Here is an example looking for files modified between May 9 2008 and May 13 2008, in /home:

touch –date “2008-05-09″ /tmp/after
touch –date “2008-05-13″ /tmp/before
find /home/ -type f -newer /tmp/after -not -newer /tmp/before

Reply

16 bhageerathan April 20, 2011

very helpful…:) thank you

Reply

17 Prashant October 17, 2011

good one

Reply

18 john August 19, 2010

-rw-rw-rw- 1 qmaster qmaster 294520 Aug 16 00:35 HSTD.191.807
-rw-rw-rw- 1 qmaster qmaster 525118 Aug 17 00:56 HSTD.191.808
-rw-rw-rw- 1 qmaster qmaster 698575 Aug 18 01:42 HSTD.191.809
-rw-rw-rw- 1 qmaster qmaster 829239 Aug 19 01:25 HSTD.191.810

I would like to copy to a directory one of the following files by using today’s date minus one. In other words when I execute my script I want yesterdays file.

any help would be appreciated.
John

Reply

19 Nick September 18, 2010

This should do the trick -

find . -type f -iname ‘HSTD*’ -daystart -mtime 1 -exec cp {} /path/to new/dir/ \;

Nick

Reply

20 Thabiso December 8, 2010

Hi,

How do I list the files of only today’s date and dump them into some output file?

Reply

21 Michael December 31, 2010

I have a new Linux server. CentOS 5.5. I want to know if their is any way to see exactly what files are added or changed or updated after I install a program. How can I do this?

Reply

22 vara June 19, 2011

i want find the files created or modified in particular date

Reply

23 rana June 30, 2011

plz tell me command for following :-

find all the files in current folder with modification time (modified in last 6 hrs and not modified in last 4hrs) with their name starting with k and they must be regular files and not directories finally delete them..

Reply

24 Ash August 19, 2011

How do i find a file based on the date input i give and move that file, a file with date before that and after that to a directory using find.
For Example: I want to find a file “identity_*” last modified on 17th Aug moved to a directory along with one modified on 18th Aug, 19th Aug.

Any inputs are highly appreciated

Reply

25 Evgeni January 20, 2012

If a file is moved to trash bin, is its ctime modified ?

Reply

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