Check date of a file in unix

Question

In my unix shell script, I have a for loop and looping thru the files in a directory, I want to check the modified date of a file is greater than some number of days, say 10 days and do some processing. Any help in this regards is highly appreciated.

Answer 1

find . -mtime +10

This could be integrated into a script in several ways. For one:

isOlder () {
    [ "`find $1 -mtime +10`" == "$1" ]
    return $?
}

ls | while read fname; do
  if isOlder "$fname"; then
    echo $fname is older 
  else
    echo $fname is not older
  fi
done

I listed the above because it sounded like you mainly wanted a test and were doing other processing. OTOH, if you really just want the older files:

$ find . -mtime +10 | while read fname; do
>   echo $fname
> done

Answer 2

The find command has a built-in test for this:

find <yourdir> -type f -mtime +10 -exec yourproc {} \;

This will run "yourproc matching_filename" on each file in <yourdir> older than 10 days.

The -ctime test works similarly, using the inode change time rather than the modification time.