16.18 Listing Files You've Created/Edited Today

If your directory is full of files and you're trying to find out which files you've made changes to (and created) today, here's how. [4] Make a shell script that stores today's date in the shell's command-line parameters. Pipe the output of ls -l to an awk script. In the awk script, put the month (which was the second word in the date output) into the awk string variable m . Put the date into the awk integer variable d -use an integer variable so date outputs like Jun 04 will match ls outputs like Jun  4 . Print any line where the two dates match.

[4] Using find with -mtime -1 (17.7 ) will list files modified within the last 24 hours. That's not quite the same thing.

#!/bin/sh
set `date`
ls -l |
awk "BEGIN { m = \"$2\"; d = $3 }
\$5 == m && \$6 == d && \$7 ~ /:/ {print}"

If your version of ls -l gives both the file's owner and group, change $5 to $6 and $6 to $7 . You can make your life simpler by getting sls (16.29 ) - it lets you set the output format (including the date format) exactly.