How to use 'find' to search for files created on a specific date? [closed]

As pointed out by Max, you can't, but checking files modified or accessed is not all that hard. I wrote a tutorial about this, as late as today. The essence of which is to use -newerXY and ! -newerXY:

Example: To find all files modified on the 7th of June, 2007:

$ find . -type f -newermt 2007-06-07 ! -newermt 2007-06-08

To find all files accessed on the 29th of september, 2008:

$ find . -type f -newerat 2008-09-29 ! -newerat 2008-09-30

Or, files which had their permission changed on the same day:

$ find . -type f -newerct 2008-09-29 ! -newerct 2008-09-30

If you don't change permissions on the file, 'c' would normally correspond to the creation date, though.

find location -ctime time_period

Examples of time_period:

• More than 30 days ago: -ctime +30

• Less than 30 days ago: -ctime -30

• Exactly 30 days ago: -ctime 30

It's two steps but I like to do it this way:

First create a file with a particular date/time. In this case, the file is 2008-10-01 at midnight

touch -t 0810010000 /tmp/t

Now we can find all files that are newer or older than the above file (going by file modified date. You can also use -anewer for accessed and -cnewer file status changed).

find / -newer /tmp/t
find / -not -newer /tmp/t

You could also look at files between certain dates by creating two files with touch

touch -t 0810010000 /tmp/t1
touch -t 0810011000 /tmp/t2

This will find files between the two dates & times

find / -newer /tmp/t1 -and -not -newer /tmp/t2