Find the time of the file received in a particular directory

Question

I have a directory called /home/mydir/test A file will be sent from some other team which lands in this directory. How to find what is the time the file came to this particular directory? ( I need both time in time stamp format and normal hh:mm:ss format too ) I have to move the files to directory which is here for more than 5 hours. How to fetch those files?

Answer 1

You can use stat -c %w filename, it will provide the date of birth in human readable way, and -C will provide in unix timestamp.

Time of birth is not supported on every filesystem; use stat -c %z, i.e. time of last change, in those cases.

Answer 2

stat without options allows you to see all timestamps (birth,access,modify,change)

Answer 3

For the last part of your question: Use find to find all files older than 5 * 60 minutes (-cmin tests for change time in minutes, +300 means more than 300); {} is replaced with the filename:

find in_dir -cmin +300 -type f -exec mv {} out_dir \;

Update: added -type f to not move in_dir itself to out_dir.