Shell Script — Get all files modified after <date>
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.
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.
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.
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