find files by date

I previously wrote about how I don’t like the find in Solaris and a work around. Well, I recently had to dig up the same work around on MacOSX, so I guess I hate it and BSD Find command equally as much as Solaris. Go GNU FIND!

The GNU find command which I like so much is this one:

find / -printf “%T+ %s %u %t %i %p\n” | sort -nr | less

It finds all the files on my system and shows me them sorted by date! I do some Unix systems administration part time contract work. When someone else was changing things on a system, this command comes in very handy to find out what was changed and when.

Of course any find expression will work with the given command so tacking on -xdev -type or anything else makes a lot of good sense.