find latest file and copy it to external portable HDD

said76 · 03-05-2013, 08:50 PM

Hi,

I'm trying to back up some files to my external hard drive. My question is if I want to find the latest modified file and copy it to my external hard drive on my Ubuntu 12.04.

I have tried to following command on terminal but with no luck:

$ cp 'ls -tr | tail -1' /media/myHDD1/backup

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thank you very much in advance

slakster · 03-05-2013, 09:41 PM

try this modification of your cmd line:

cp $(ls -rt |tail -1 ) > /media/HDD/backup

most folks use a variation of this to find all recently changed files in the current dir:

find . -mtime +1 -exec cp {} /media/HDD/backup \;

chrism01 · 03-05-2013, 10:26 PM

The above should work. The mistake in OP was using single quotes (') instead of backquotes (`).

Actually that's not very clear (at least in my fonts); lets try code tags

Code:

single (')
back (`)

A bit clearer imho.

lleb · 03-05-2013, 11:24 PM

a little off topic here, but instead of using cp, he could do the following with rsync yes:

Code:

find . -mtime +1 -exec rsync -aviS '{}' /media/myHDD1/backup \;

or

Code:

rsync -aviS `ls -tr | tail -1` /media/myHDD1/backup

will rsync function the same way as cp?

said76 · 03-06-2013, 12:45 AM

Yes, it works fine. Thank you for letting me know that I should use (`) instead of ('). Obviously, I did not pay attention closely enough. Thank you once again.

And thank you everyone for their comments as well.

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrism01

The above should work. The mistake in OP was using single quotes (') instead of backquotes (`).

Actually that's not very clear (at least in my fonts); lets try code tags

Code:

single (')
back (`)

A bit clearer imho.

shivaa · 03-06-2013, 01:06 AM

For latest modified files, use -1 instead of +1 with find cmd:

Code:

~$ find . -mtime -1 -print
~$ find . -mtime -1 -exec rsync -aviS '{}' /media/myHDD1/backup \;

-1 option will list out files modified within last 1 day, whereas +1 option will list out files modified before 1 day.

mandyapenguin · 03-06-2013, 03:06 AM

You can use rsync. Rsync is a fast and extraordinarily versatile file copying tool. It can copy locally, to/from another host. Rsync finds files that need to be transferred using a "quick check" algorithm (by default) that looks for files that have changed in size or in last-modified time.
Example usages are:

Code:

rsync -avz --progress /source/directory /destination/directory/

When you run the same command again, it sends only those that changes are made in the source.
if you wanted logs of rsync you can try

Code:

rsync -avz --progress --log-file=/tmp/rsynclog /source/directory /destination/directory/ && echo && cat /tmp/rsynclog