Fd: Search based on file timestamps (atime, ctime, mtime)

Created on 11 Nov 2017 · 12Comments · Source: sharkdp/fd

find has this very useful feature that I use often, which is timestamp-based file search. You're probably familiar with it already, but here's the documentation for those flags:

-atime n
              File  was  last  accessed n*24 hours ago.  When find figures out
              how many 24-hour periods ago the file  was  last  accessed,  any
              fractional part is ignored, so to match -atime +1, a file has to
              have been accessed at least two days ago.

-ctime n
              File's status was last changed n*24 hours ago.  See the comments
              for -atime to understand how rounding affects the interpretation
              of file status change times.

-mtime n
              File's  data was last modified n*24 hours ago.  See the comments
              for -atime to understand how rounding affects the interpretation
              of file modification times.

What do you think? Thank you.

feature-request good first issue

Source

guihkx

👍13

Most helpful comment

Just an idea, but I think it would be cool if we could parse relative timespans (as well as absolute date/times) and allow for things like:

fd --older-than "2 weeks"
fd --changed-within "3 days"

sharkdp on 8 Jan 2018

👍7

All 12 comments

Sounds good. Do we need all three? I would guess that -mtime is used most of the time? Also, not all of them will be available cross-platform.

sharkdp on 12 Nov 2017

👍2

I just use -mtime as well, but I suggested all of them just in case. :+1:

guihkx on 12 Nov 2017

I agree with adding support for only file modification time. And I think a more powerful syntax for describing the time duration may help, e.g. 20min, 1h, 5d. Time moment is helpful too, but that could be too ambiguous.

ChengCat on 27 Nov 2017

👍1

Just an idea, but I think it would be cool if we could parse relative timespans (as well as absolute date/times) and allow for things like:

fd --older-than "2 weeks"
fd --changed-within "3 days"

sharkdp on 8 Jan 2018

👍7

I agree that an mtime feature would be a valuable addition

Dowwie on 2 Apr 2018

atime is a nice feature when you want to clean a file server :)
in GNU find, there is also amin, cmin and mmin that that does the same thing as the ?time variants but based on minutes instead of hours, (very) useful when you want smaller granularity :)

Manozco on 27 Apr 2018

Not completely sure about the best names for those options, but I think we should move forward by using humantime::parse_duration to implement both --changed-within and --older-than (or --changed-before?).

sharkdp on 1 Oct 2018

Hi,
I'd be interested in tackling this issue.
Could I have some pointers for starting?