how do I check in bash whether a file was created more than x time ago

Question

I want to check in linux bash  whether a file was created more than x time ago   let s say the file is called text txt and the time is 2 hours    if   what     then      echo  old enough   fi

User · Answer

The find one is good but I think you can use anotherway  especially if you need to now how many seconds is the file old  date -d  now -    stat -c   Y   filename   seconds    s  using GNU date

User · Answer

Only for modification time  if test  find  text txt  -mmin  120  then     echo old enough fi   You can use -cmin for change or -amin for access time   As others pointed I don   t think you can track creation time

User · Answer

Creation time isn t stored   What are stored are three timestamps  generally  they can be turned off on certain filesystems or by certain filesystem options     Last access time Last modification time Last change time   a  Change  to the file is counted as permission changes  rename etc  While the modification is contents only

User · Answer

Although ctime isn t technically the time of creation  it quite often is   Since ctime it isn t affected by changes to the contents of the file  it s usually only updated when the file is created   And yes - I can hear you all screaming - it s also updated if you change the access permissions or ownership      but generally that s something that s done once  usually at the same time you put the file there   Personally I always use mtime for everything  and I imagine that is what you want   But anyway      here s a rehash of Guss s  unattractive  bash  in an easy to use function       bin bash function age        local filename  1    local changed  stat -c  Y   filename      local now  date   s     local elapsed     let elapsed now-changed    echo  elapsed    file     echo The age of  file is   age   file   seconds

User · Answer

I always liked using date -r  the file   s to find its age   You can also do touch --date  2015-10-10 9 55   tmp file to get extremely fine-grained time on an arbitrary date time

User · Answer

I use  file age         local filename  1     echo       date   s  -   date -r  filename   s        is stale         local filename  1     local max minutes 20         file age  filename  -gt      max minutes 60         if is stale  my file  then         fi

User · Answer

Consider the outcome of the tool  stat      File   infolog txt    Size  694         Blocks  8          IO Block  4096   regular file Device  801h 2049d  Inode  11635578    Links  1 Access   0644 -rw-r--r--   Uid    1000      fdr    Gid    1000      fdr  Access  2009-01-01 22 04 15 000000000 -0800 Modify  2009-01-01 22 05 05 000000000 -0800 Change  2009-01-01 22 05 05 000000000 -0800   You can see here the three dates for Access modify change  There is no created date  You can only really be sure when the file contents were modified  the  modify  field  or its inode changed  the  change  field    Examples of when both fields get updated    Modify  will be updated if someone concatenated extra information to the end of the file    Change  will be updated if someone changed permissions via chmod

User · Answer

Using the stat to figure out the last modification date of the file  date to figure out the current time and a liberal use of bashisms  one can do the test that you want based on the file s last modification time1   if          date    s   -   stat -c   Y   somefile      -gt  7200     then    echo   somefile is older then 2 hours  fi   While the code is a bit less readable then the find approach  I think its a better approach then running find to look at a file you already  found   Also  date manipulation is fun  -      As Phil correctly noted creation time is not recorded  but use  Z instead of  Y below to get  change time  which may be what you want     Update   For mac users  use stat -f   m   somefile instead of the Linux specific syntax above

[linux] how do I check in bash whether a file was created more than x time ago?

Examples related to linux

Examples related to bash

Examples related to command-line