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I know I can use this option to find file between particular modified times. But I'm curious about what does this mean?
I used man find | grep newermt trying to find something. But I got no direct content. It seems -newer file and mtime stuff may have relation with it. But I'm not sure..
So, what does -newermt actually mean?
find(1):
-newerXY reference
Compares the timestamp of the current file with reference. The
reference argument is normally the name of a file (and one of
its timestamps is used for the comparison) but it may also be a
string describing an absolute time. X and Y are placeholders
for other letters, and these letters select which time belonging
to how reference is used for the comparison.
a The access time of the file reference
B The birth time of the file reference
c The inode status change time of reference
m The modification time of the file reference
t reference is interpreted directly as a time
find ./ -mtime +n used to get all files older than n days
find ./ -mtime -n used to get all files modified in last n days
Now if you are using 1 in place of n, you will get files modified in the last 24 hours. But what if you want only files from yesterday and not within the last 24 hours? Here newermt comes into the picture.
find ./ -newermt "2016-01-18" ! -newermt '2016-01-19'
will give you all files which are newer than specified date and ! will exclude all files which are newer than the specified date. So the above command will give a list of files which were modified on 2016-01-18.
Regarding -newermt, natural language is tricky.
You say "newer than", but one should say "newer than or equal to".
Mathematically, this corresponds to the sign ‘≥’, not to ‘>’.
-newermt given-date means file-date ≥ given-date.
touch file1; sleep 60; touch file2; sleep 60; touch file and then find . -newer file2 (or, equivalently, -newermm file2), I get only file3, not file2. If the test were newer or equal, it would report that the modification time of file2 is equal to itself.
Jun 8, 2022 at 1:37
touch -t 202209090909 foo; 2. ls -l --time-style=full-iso foo (which shows 2022-09-09 09:09:00.000000000); 3. find -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -name foo -newermt '2022-09-09 09:09:00' yields nothing; but 4. find -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -name foo -newermt '2022-09-09 09:08:59' finds the test file.
touch or when extracting files from an archive that have been published with a particular date.