How to find files modified in last x minutes find -mmin does not work as expected

Question

I m trying to find files modified in last x minutes  for example in the last hour  Many forums and tutorials on the net suggest to use the find command with the -mmin option  like this   find   -mmin -60  xargs ls -l  However  this command did not work for me as expected  As you can see from the following listing  it also shows files modified earlier than 1 hour ago   -rw------- 1 user user   9065 Oct 28 23 13 1446070435 V902I67a5567M283852 harvester -rw------- 1 user user   1331 Oct 29 01 10 1446077402 V902I67a5b34M538793 harvester -rw------- 1 user user   1615 Oct 29 01 36 1446078983 V902I67a5b35M267251 harvester -rw------- 1 user user  72365 Oct 29 02 27 1446082022 V902I67a5b36M873811 harvester -rw------- 1 user user  69102 Oct 29 02 27 1446082024 V902I67a5b37M142247 harvester -rw------- 1 user user   2611 Oct 29 02 34 1446082482 V902I67a5b38M258101 harvester -rw------- 1 user user   2612 Oct 29 02 34 1446082485 V902I67a5b39M607107 harvester -rw------- 1 user user   2600 Oct 29 02 34 1446082488 V902I67a5b3aM465574 harvester -rw------- 1 user user  10779 Oct 29 03 27 1446085622 V902I67a5b3bM110329 harvester -rw------- 1 user user   5836 Oct 29 03 27 1446085623 V902I67a5b3cM254104 harvester -rw------- 1 user user   8970 Oct 29 04 27 1446089232 V902I67a5b3dM936339 harvester -rw------- 1 user user 165393 Oct 29 06 10 1446095400 V902I67a5b3eM290158 harvester -rw------- 1 user user 105054 Oct 29 06 10 1446095430 V902I67a5b3fM265065 harvester -rw------- 1 user user   1615 Oct 29 06 24 1446096244 V902I67a5b40M55701 harvester -rw------- 1 user user   1620 Oct 29 06 24 1446096292 V902I67a5b41M337769 harvester -rw------- 1 user user  10436 Oct 29 06 36 1446096973 V902I67a5b42M707215 harvester -rw------- 1 user user   7150 Oct 29 06 36 1446097019 V902I67a5b43M415731 harvester -rw------- 1 user user   4357 Oct 29 06 39 1446097194 V902I67a5b56M446687 harvester -rw------- 1 user user   4283 Oct 29 06 39 1446097195 V902I67a5b57M957052 harvester -rw------- 1 user user   4393 Oct 29 06 39 1446097197 V902I67a5b58M774506 harvester -rw------- 1 user user   4264 Oct 29 06 39 1446097198 V902I67a5b59M532213 harvester -rw------- 1 user user   4272 Oct 29 06 40 1446097201 V902I67a5b5aM534679 harvester -rw------- 1 user user   4274 Oct 29 06 40 1446097228 V902I67a5b5dM363553 harvester -rw------- 1 user user  20905 Oct 29 06 44 1446097455 V902I67a5b5eM918314 harvester   Actually  it just listed all files in the current directory  We can take one of these files as an example and check if its modification time is really as displayed by the ls command   stat 1446070435 V902I67a5567M283852 harvester    File     1446070435 V902I67a5567M283852 harvester      Size  9065        Blocks  24         IO Block  4096   regular file Device  902h 2306d  Inode  108680551   Links  1 Access   0600 -rw-------   Uid    1001    user    Gid    1027    user  Access  2015-10-28 23 13 55 281515368  0100 Modify  2015-10-28 23 13 55 281515368  0100 Change  2015-10-28 23 13 55 313515539  0100   As we can see  this file was definitely last modified earlier than 1 hour ago  I also tried find -mmin 60 or find -mmin  60  but it did not work either   Why is this happening and how to use the find command correctly

User · Answer

The problem is that  find   -mmin -60   outputs       file1   file2   Note the line with one dot  That makes ls list the whole directory exactly the same as when ls -l   is executed   One solution is to list only files  not directories    find   -mmin -60 -type f   xargs ls -l   But it is better to use directly the option -exec of find   find   -mmin -60 -type f -exec ls -l         Or just   find   -mmin -60 -type f -ls   Which  by the way is safe even including directories   find   -mmin -60 -ls

User · Answer

This may work for you  I used it for cleaning folders during deployments for deleting old deployment files   clean anyfolder         local temp2   1        PATH     temp3     ls -d  temp2 -t   grep   date   awk   print  2    3            j 0      while    j -lt    temp3           do             echo  to be removed   temp3  j                delete file or folder   temp3  j   0   DELETE HERE         fi         j  expr  j   1      done

User · Answer

I am working through the same need and I believe your timeframe is incorrect   Try these    15min change  find   -mtime - 01 1hr change  find   -mtime - 04 12 hr change  find   -mtime - 5   You should be using 24 hours as your base  The number after -mtime should be relative to 24 hours  Thus - 5 is the equivalent of 12 hours  because 12 hours is half of 24 hours

User · Answer

To search for files in  target directory and all its sub-directories  that have been modified in the last 60 minutes     find  target directory -type f -mmin -60   To find the most recently modified files  sorted in the reverse order of update time  i e   the most recently updated files first      find  etc -type f -printf   TY- Tm- Td  TT  p n    sort -r

User · Answer

Actually  there s more than one issue here  The main one is that xargs by default executes the command you specified  even when no arguments have been passed  To change that you might use a GNU extension to xargs      --no-run-if-empty   -r   If the standard input does not contain any nonblanks  do not run the command   Normally  the command is run once even if there is no input   This option is a GNU extension    Simple example   find   -mmin -60   xargs -r ls -l   But this might match to all subdirectories  including    the current directory   and ls will list each of them individually  So the output will be a mess  Solution  pass -d to ls  which prohibits listing the directory contents   find   -mmin -60   xargs -r ls -ld   Now you don t like    the current directory  in your list  Solution  exclude the first directory level  0  from find output   find   -mindepth 1 -mmin -60   xargs -r ls -ld   Now you d need only the files in your list  Solution  exclude the directories   find   -type f -mmin -60   xargs -r ls -l   Now you have some files with names containing white space  quote marks  or backslashes  Solution  use null-terminated output  find  and input  xargs   these are also GNU extensions  afaik    find   -type f -mmin -60 -print0   xargs -r0 ls -l

User · Answer

I can reproduce your problem if there are no files in the directory that were modified in the last hour   In that case  find   -mmin -60 returns nothing  The command find   -mmin -60  xargs ls -l  however  returns every file in the directory which is consistent with what happens when ls -l is run without an argument   To make sure that ls -l is only run when a file is found  try   find   -mmin -60 -type f -exec ls -l

User · Answer

Manual of find       Numeric arguments can be specified as      n     for greater than n      -n     for less than n      n      for exactly n      -amin n           File was last accessed n minutes ago      -anewer file           File was last accessed more recently than file was modified   If file is a symbolic link and the -H option or the -L option is in effect  the access time of the file it points  to  is  always           used      -atime n           File  was  last  accessed  n 24 hours ago   When find figures out how many 24-hour periods ago the file was last accessed  any fractional part is ignored  so to match -atime  1  a file has to           have been accessed at least two days ago      -cmin n           File s status was last changed n minutes ago      -cnewer file           File s status was last changed more recently than file was modified   If file is a symbolic link and the -H option or the -L option is in effect  the status-change time of the file it  points           to is always used      -ctime n           File s status was last changed n 24 hours ago   See the comments for -atime to understand how rounding affects the interpretation of file status change times    Example   find  dir -cmin -60   creation time find  dir -mmin -60   modification time find  dir -amin -60   access time

User · Answer

this command may be help you sir  find -type f -mtime -60

[linux] How to find files modified in last x minutes (find -mmin does not work as expected)

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