Shell Script to update the contents of a folder.

Question

Hello Everyone,

I'm a beginner in Unix Shell Scripting and Perl Scripting.

I would like to have an example program that teaches me how to update a file contents on a directory. The scenario is, there is a directory which has some n number of files. Among those n number of files, m number of files have been modified. I need to update the contents of the modified files in the directory.

Give me a simple shell script to do this.

Thanks and Regards,

Vijay

Answer 1

I would do it with find like this:

find your_directory -newermt time_of_last_check -exec modify_script.sh {} \;

where:

your_directory is the directory where you have the files.

time_of_last_check is when you last ran this command

modify_script.sh is the program that you will run to modify the files, it should take one argument, and that is the filename to modify.

Answer 2

In Perl

• To Update a File content see perlfaq5, you will find lot of information regarding File manipulation.You will get a lot of examples of file manipulations.
• Getting File or Dir Statistics see perl built in function stat.
• For Traverse a directory tree, see File::Find