[SOLVED] BASH scripting: using date to find a filename

thealmightyos · 03-25-2014, 03:43 PM

Hello all. I thought this would be real easy. Yet here I am over 2 hours later still messing with it. Here is what I got:

I have files with the following naming convention (name_YEAR_MONTH-DAY.notes). I am attempting to find and display all files where the date within the name of the file is under 7 days old. Why don't I use the -mtime option for find? That is because these files were transferred from another source all at the same time and thus according to the filesystem they were created/modified on the same day so -mtime or any of the other time criteria would not help me in this situation.

I thought it would be real easy to just grab the date, format it, then stick it into a find function. To test the idea I created this script:

Code:

name=$(date +"%Y_%m-%d")
find *$name* -exec cat {} \;

It worked perfectly. So now all I got to do is get date to give me dates for the last 7 days. Easy right? Not so much

The command to give you a previous date is date --date='n days ago' with n being the number of days you want to go back. So I wrote this up:

Code:

for day in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
do
name=$(date +"%Y_%m-%d" --date='$day days ago')
find *$name* -exec cat {} \;
done

Well that didn't work at all. It seems to keep getting caught in the date --date switch. It doesn't like a variable in there. I have tried creating a variable for the whole 'n days ago' string and plugging it in but it won't take that ether. Not quite sure what to do at this point. Without the output from the date function I don't think I can make this script work.

Any ideas?

paladin.michael · 03-25-2014, 04:00 PM

Quote:

name=$(date +"%Y_%m-%d" --date='$day days ago')

use double quotes around $day days ago, single quotes prevent the variable from being de-referenced.

EDIT: ugh, my c++ is showing. dereferenced isn't the correct word but I can't remember the right one. hopefully my meaning is clear enough.

thealmightyos · 03-25-2014, 04:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by paladin.michael

use double quotes around $day days ago, single quotes prevent the variable from being de-referenced.

EDIT: ugh, my c++ is showing. dereferenced isn't the correct word but I can't remember the right one. hopefully my meaning is clear enough.

YES! Your meaning was understood. I have changed my script thus:

Code:

for day in {0..6}
do
name=$(date --date="$day days ago" +"%Y_%m-%d")
find *$name* 2>/dev/null -exec cat {} \;
done

Now it works great.

I added the 2>/dev/null to find in order to remove errors when we get a date that does not have a corresponding file. I also changed my $day variable to 0-6 as 1-7 would not include the current day.

Thank you for your help. I knew it had to be something minor like that.

Now, to make a script that will move files over 15 days old into folders sorted by month. Shouldn't be too much different.

paladin.michael · 03-25-2014, 04:45 PM

Happy to help.