Using find with mtime

March 2, 2008 Commands, Scripting No Comments

The ‘find’ command is a very powerful search tool in UNIX systems. The mtime option comes in very handy when I am trying to troubleshoot a problem, automate tasks or do forensics. Below are some examples:

Finding all files owned by apache modified in the last 3 days within /var/www/html:

find /var/www/html -type f -user apache -mtime -3


Finding all files that were modified 3 days ago or before in the current directory:

find . -type f -mtime +3


Deleting all files in the current directory older than (modified before) 100 days:

find . -type f -mtime +100 -exec rm -f '{}' \;