"find" and {a,c,m}time

Michael Morrell morrell at hpsal2.HP.COM
Tue Oct 11 15:56:50 AEST 1988


> I use "find (files) | afio (etc...)" to backup my SCO Xenix 286 v2.2.1
> filesystem, which is at around 80 megabytes right now. I would like to
> be able to do incremental backups, but I'm having a problem...

> find pathname-list expression
> ...
> -atime n	True if the file has been accessed in n days.
> -ctime n	True if the file has been changed in n days.
> -mtime n	True if the file has been modified in n days.

> Okay, so "find -?time 3 -print" should find all files ?'d within the
> last three days, right? Nope.
----------

You didn't read the man page carefully enough.  Earlier in the page it says
(or at least it does on my system):

  In the descriptions of the primaries, the argument n is used
  as a decimal integer where +n means more than n, -n means
  less than n and n means exactly n.

This says that a "find -mtime -3 -print" will find all files modified within
the last 3 days.

Hope this helps,

Michael



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