Moving files with certain datestamp?

ginda · 03-28-2008, 05:21 AM

Hi Guys

Is there a way you can move all files in a directory that have a specific date and time stamp?

Thanks in advance

colucix · 03-28-2008, 05:46 AM

You mean an exact timestamp with date, hour and minute? I cannot figure out why you need this, but one way could be

Code:

#!/bin/bash
time="2008-03-28 07:30"
ls -l --time-style +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M" /path/to/dir | while read line
do
   filetime=$(echo $line | gawk '{print $6,$7}')
   file=$(echo $line | gawk '{print $NF}')
   test "$filetime" = "$time" && echo $file
done

that is you generate a list of files in the long format using a customized timestamp, then from each line extract the timestamp and the filename and compare the timestamp with a specific time of your choice. Finally you move the file to another location. In the example above I put an echo statement for testing purposes: when you're confident with the results you can substitute it with the mv command. If you want to do this recursively, use the find command as in:

Code:

find /path/to/dir -type f -exec ls -l --time-style +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M" {} \; | while read line

ginda · 03-28-2008, 05:51 AM

Thats sounds good, is there a way where i could specify a range i.e. file time and date stamps from 2008 march 01 to 2008 march 31

thanks again

colucix · 03-28-2008, 06:36 AM

Yes. You can specify the two dates and modify the test like this:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
initime="2008-03-01 00:00"
endtime="2008-03-31 23:59"
find /path/to/dir -type f -exec ls -l --time-style +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M" {} \; | while read line
do
   filetime=$(echo $line | gawk '{print $6,$7}')
   file=$(echo $line | gawk '{print $NF}')
   test "$filetime" \> "$initime" -a "$filetime" \< "$endtime" && echo $file
done

Here I've used the version with the find command because I noticed that the output of ls -l gives an extra line with the total. Furthermore it lists also the directories and would have moved them as well. Anyway, if you don't want to recurse inside directories, simply add the option "-maxdepth 1" to the find command.

Note that the test does a string comparison, but dates in the format YYYYMMDD HHMM are ordered either alphabetically and numerically. So you can safely do comparison in this way. If you had a format like MM/DD/YYYY this would not be valid anymore!

osor · 03-28-2008, 04:27 PM

There are easier ways to do this using the magic of the find command itself. For example,

Code:

touch -t 200803010000 initfile
touch -t 200803312359 finifile

find -type f -newer initfile ! -newer finifile -exec mv '{}' dest ';'

rm initfile finifile

If you are in an interactive shell, you might have to escape the ! sign (i.e., ‘\!’).