Shell Script — Get all files modified after <date>

I'd rather not do this in PHP so I'm hoping a someone decent at shell scripting can help.

I need a script that runs through directory recursively and finds all files with last modified date is greater than some date. Then, it will tar and zip the file(s) keeping the path information.

as simple as:

find . -mtime -1 | xargs tar --no-recursion -czf myfile.tgz

where find . -mtime -1 will select all the files in (recursively) current directory modified day before. you can use fractions, for example:

find . -mtime -1.5 | xargs tar --no-recursion -czf myfile.tgz

If you have GNU find, then there are a legion of relevant options. The only snag is that the interface to them is less than stellar:

• -mmin n (modification time in minutes)
• -mtime n (modification time in days)
• -newer file (modification time newer than modification time of file)
• -daystart (adjust start time from current time to start of day)
• Plus alternatives for access time and 'change' or 'create' time.

The hard part is determining the number of minutes since a time.

One option worth considering: use touch to create a file with the required modification time stamp; then use find with -newer.

touch -t 200901031231.43 /tmp/wotsit
find . -newer /tmp/wotsit -print
rm -f /tmp/wotsit

This looks for files newer than 2009-01-03T12:31:43. Clearly, in a script, /tmp/wotsit would be a name with the PID or other value to make it unique; and there'd be a trap to ensure it gets removed even if the user interrupts, and so on and so forth.

You can do this directly with tar and even better:

tar -N '2014-02-01 18:00:00' -jcvf archive.tar.bz2 files

This instructs tar to compress files newer than 1st of January 2014, 18:00:00.

This will work for some number of files. You want to include "-print0" and "xargs -0" in case any of the paths have spaces in them. This example looks for files modified in the last 7 days. To find those modified before the last 7 days, use "+7".

find . -mtime -7 -print0 | xargs -0 tar -cjf /foo/archive.tar.bz2

As this page warns, xargs can cause the tar command to be executed multiple times if there are a lot of arguments, and the "-c" flag could cause problems. In that case, you would want this:

find . -mtime -7 -print0 | xargs -0 tar -rf /foo/archive.tar

You can't update a zipped tar archive with tar, so you would have to bzip2 or gzip it in a second step.

This should show all files modified within the last 7 days.

find . -type f -mtime -7 -print

Pipe that into tar/zip, and you should be good.