Can find's -newermt accept epoch time?

Stephen

1/26/24, 9:19 PM

I seek to find files made after a specific time similar to how this command does it:

find . -type f -newermt '1/30/2017 0:00:00'

except instead of a date, and time, string, I need the time stamp to be in epoch time as read from the EPOCHSECONDS system variable. Can this be done? Or will it be necessary to convert EPOCHSECONDS to a date and time string?

I am asking because in a shell script I need to set a variable value equal to EPOCHSECONDS, do some commands that will make changes to unknown files, and then use the find command to see what files those commands changed.

368

1 + 1

bash

find

Steve Summit

1/27/24, 6:15 PM

It might be more straightforward to just touch a temporary file, do your commands, then find files simply `-newer` than the temporary file.

Score:8

Ubuntu

steeldriver

1/26/24, 9:27 PM

Yes it can.

The -newerXY entry of man find tells us that

Time specifications are interpreted as for the  argument
to  the -d option of GNU date.

and from the info 'date input formats' node:

29.9 Seconds since the Epoch

If you precede a number with ‘@’, it represents an internal timestamp as a count of seconds. The number can contain an internal decimal point (either ‘.’ or ‘,’); any excess precision not supported by the internal representation is truncated toward minus infinity. Such a number cannot be combined with any other date item, as it specifies a complete timestamp.

So for example

find . -type f -newermt @1485752400

secs=$(date +%s -d '1/30/2017 0:00:00')
find . -type f -newermt "@$secs"

+ 2

Stephen

1/26/24, 9:54 PM

Thank you for your reply. The epoch time I need to pass to find will be stored in a variable. The example you have given uses a numeric literal. By what syntax can a variable containing an epoch time value be passed to find? Can this variable be prefixed by @ just as the literal is in your example?

steeldriver

1/26/24, 10:08 PM

@Stephen yes it can - see edit

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Can find's -newermt accept epoch time?

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