Find files newer than another file within each subdirectory

Question

I have a folder structure like this

/Class/Student/Unit/files

Each Unit folder contains a file MarkSheet* that I update when I mark a students work.

I need a script that tests if the student has uploaded files newer than when I last marked their work.

The following is as close as I have been able to get (which doesn't work).

#!/bin/sh
find . -mindepth 3 -maxdepth 3 -type d -name '*' -execdir \
find "{}" -type f -newer "{}"/MarkSheet* \;

Answer 1

for ms in Class/*/*/MarkSheet*; do
  find "${ms%/*}" -type f -newer "$ms"
done

With your approach, you need to a shell to expand the MarkSheet* glob. So:

find . -mindepth 3 -maxdepth 3 -type d -exec sh -c '
  for dir do
    find "$dir" -type f -newer "$dir"/MarkSheet*
  done' sh {} +

Answer 2

Try this:

find /Class/ -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d | while IFS= read -r student; do
    find "$student" -type f -newer "$student/Unit/MarkSheet"*
done

The first find looks for the student directories and the second for files neer than the corresponding MarkSheet.

You can also do it the other way around:

find Class/ -name 'MarkSheet*' | while IFS= read -r mark; do 
  find "$(dirname "$mark")" -newer "$mark" -type f; 
done

The trick here is to use dirname to get the name of the directory containing the MarkSheet* file.