find command sometimes results in non-matching files being zipped

Question

I'm trying to make a zip file of all the files in a specific directory which were modified in the last x minutes.

Here's my command:

find "/path/to/dir" -mmin -30 -not -name ".*" -exec zip -r "testfile.zip" "{}" \+

If I make the modify time small enough, then it correctly identifies the one file that I recently changed.

The problem is... if I increase the minimum modify time to, say, 50 (it keeps changing), then the zip file adds all of the files in /path/to/dir. Even though all the files were definitely not changed.

So somehow, there is a specific file that is causing the whole find command to blow up. I looked through all the recently modified files (within last day) for a file with spaces in it or something, but I didn't find any. And it shouldn't matter, since I'm quoting the braces, right?

What else could be causing this weird behavior?

Answer 1

By default, find includes everything in its search: directories, files, and symlinks.

find "/path/to/dir" -mmin -30 -not -name ".*" -exec zip -r "testfile.zip" "{}" \+

If /path/to/dir was modified in the last 30 minutes, it will pass all the tests, and zip, since it was given the -r option, will add the directory and everything under it to the archive.

You can approach this in a few ways, using either (or both) of the following:

• Don't give zip the -r option. You're only interested in recently-modified files rather than every file that is in a recently-modified directory.
• Add the -not -type d test to the find expression, so that it doesn't match directories.

find "/path/to/dir" -not -type d -mmin -30 -not -name ".*" -exec zip "testfile.zip" "{}" \+