Unix Shell: find files by a date range

Ville Walveranta — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:13:50 +0000

I needed to restore some files from an archive on UNIX, but only the files of a particular date-range were needed. It took a few moments to find and figure out how I could easily extract files older than a particular date, or files from a particular date-range. This is how:

Create a perimeter file, like so:
touch -t yyyymmddHHMM marker_date
List files older than the marker_date:
find . -type f ! -newer marker_date -ls
Of course, instead of `-ls’ parameter (to list), you can use `-print’ and a pipe to xargs to, for example, delete the selected files, etc.

Likewise, for a range of dates:

Create the perimeter files:
touch -t yyyymmddHHMM range_start
touch -t yyyymmddHHMM range_end
List the files between the range dates:
find . -type f -newer range_start ! -newer range_end -ls

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Unix Shell: find files by a date range