How to find which files and folders were deleted recently in Linux?

I am having one particular folder (/home/sam/officedocuments) which is having hundreds of folders and files. I think I deleted some files and folders by mistake but I'm not sure.

How to find which files / folders were:

• deleted recently in Linux?
• changed recently in Linux?

I just want to know which files and folders were deleted. Recovering those deleted files and folders is not important for me.

OS: CentOS

Solution 1:

…changed recently in Linux?

Use find to search by modification time. For example, to find files touched in the last 3 days:

find /home/sam/officedocuments -mtime -3

For "older than 3 days", use +3.

…deleted recently in Linux?

Pretty much impossible. When a file is deleted, it's simply gone. On most systems, this is not logged anywhere.

Solution 2:

You should probably install Inotify Tools. then you can use the inotifywait command to listen for events happening for the specified directory.

Specifically if you want to watch for deleted files and folder use this

inotifywait -m -r -e delete dir_name

and log this output in some file.

Hope this solves your problem