Script or command to list all top-level directories that contain sub-directories with modified files less than 30 days old

Question

This is quite a unique one.

I'm looking for a way to list all top-level directories in a folder that contain sub-directories with new or modified files less than 30 days old in them.

We use a replication method to sync user files to a central repository and I'm looking for a way to monitor which users have synced files within the last month. We can then troubleshoot the ones that are not.

I've used "find . -type d -mtime -30" but this lists every sub-folder and the output is too big to provide a concise picture.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

I would use find on each directory in turn, and pipe it to grep -q . to check if there are any results, and print the directory name conditionally upon whether or not there were any results:

for d in */; do find "$d" -type f -mtime -30 | grep -q . && printf %s\\n "$d"; done

Answer 2

This might be not efficient:

find -mindepth 3 -maxdepth 3 -type f -mtime -30 | 
    xargs -n 1 dirname | 
    xargs -n 1 dirname | 
    uniq # (or sort -u, I assume find's output is already sorted)

Answer 3

find */ -type f -mtime -30 -print0 | 
    sed -z -e  's:/.*$::' | 
    sort -z -u | 
    tr '\000' '\n'

Requires GNU sort and GNU sed for the -z (NUL-separated input) options.

find lists all files in subdirectories of the current directory less than 30 days old. output is piped into sed to remove everything after the first /, then into sort to unique sort the resulting directory names.