In Linux Fedora, How can I select files to move by time interval

Question

How can I select and move files that were written in a specified time interval, such as 1530 to 1730 local time on a recent date?

Background: I use Linux Fedora 12, and I have made my first, and long overdue, back up of my home directory to an external hard drive preparatory to upgrading to the latest Fedora release, on a new computer, using rsync. Unfortunately, although I did a lot of dry runs to check that it would work correctly, I misunderstood the destination file specification and now have all my backed up files (60000 files in 32Gb) mixed in with the original disk contents instead of in their own separate directory. So I would like to select all the files saved during the hour that the backup took, and move them to another directory.

Answer 1

As @grebneke suggested, following command with help to move files

find . ! -path . -cmin -200  -cmin +100 -exec echo mv -v {} /tmp/  \;

This is also dry run because we have used echo, if output looks good then you can remove echo and move files.

find command explanation

• . where to look
• ! -path . exclude current directory
• -cmin -200 200 minutes ago
• -cmin +100 100 minutes ago
• -exec Execute command
• { } The string { } replaced by the matches file name
• \; Needs to be there as it tells the end of arguements provided to -exec variable

Answer 2

As suggested by Stephane Chazelas, you could use find and check for ctime.

Assuming the backup was initiated 200 minutes ago, and terminated 100 minutes ago, this will find anything with a ctime in that interval:

find -cmin -200 -cmin +100

Do your dry-runs and if it looks good, construct your restauration based on that.

Update:

A general starting point for moving your files could look like (remove echo to mv for real):

find source --mindepth 1 -cmin -200 -cmin +100 -exec echo mv -v "{}" target \;

where --mindepth 1 helps avoid source itself being moved (in that case you could just mv source target), and "{}" makes mv work for pathnames containing spaces. That should cover normal cases, unless you have pathnames containing newlines or other unusual characters.

You might prefer moving directories first, to avoid warnings from find when it can't search in subdirectories it just moved. -type d:

find source -type d --mindepth 1 -cmin -200 -cmin +100 -exec echo mv -v "{}" target \;

As always: dry-run (echo) first to simulate what would happen. Here is a similar discussion from Stack Overflow