How to copy files into another dir based on timestamp (day of the month) of the files?

Question

Say I have these files in dir1:

-rw-r--r--  1 user user  10240 Jul  2 11:54 10_data.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 user user  36048 Jul  4 11:56 95_data.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 user user  35634 Jul  7 11:56 01_data.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 user user  10630 Jul  9 11:56 19_data.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 user user  35476 Jul  9 11:57 93_data.txt

I want to be able to copy these files based on their timestamps, specifically the day of the month (2, 4, 7 and 9).

Ex:

copy 10_data.txt into a directory called 02
copy 19_data.txt into a directory called 09
copy 93_data.txt into a directory called 09

Destination directories (01, 02, 03 , etc.) would already exist, so no need to create them or anything. I plan to run this as a cron job daily after midnight.

Can I use find for this task along with (date +%d) or something like that?

Thank you!

Answer 1

If you have zsh available, you could do this with its zstat module:

zmodload zsh/stat
for f in *.txt
do
  cp -p -- "$f" $(zstat -F %d +mtime "$f")/
done

The zstat -F %d +mtime command asks for the formatted output (-F %d) of the day-of-the-month of the files' modification times. The resulting decimal number is in the range 01 to 31, and is used as the target for the cp command.

Answer 2

stat is your friend for finding out when a file was modified, or its size, or most any of the file attributes that ls would display.

On FreeBSD, for example, stat -f %Sm -t %d -- foo will show you the day of the month when file foo was last modified, which appears to be what you are after.

No need for find, you can iterate over the files directly, such as in this bash example:

for f in *; do
  d=$(stat -f %Sm -t %d -- "$f")
  cp -p -- "$f" $d/
done

Responding to your comment that your target OS is RedHat, it appears that RedHat's stat utility does not have the formatting flexibility that FreeBSD's has. You can compare the man pages here.

You may find the command date -r foo "+%d" a suitable substitute. The relevant line of the script would then become:

  d=$(date -r "$f" "+%d")

Answer 3

You may try like this. I've tested. It should work

cp `ls -ltrh *txt  | awk '{if($7=2){print $NF}}'` `ls -ltrh *txt  | awk '{print $7}'`

I've considered for only day of 2 and directory is on same path. Kindly add other dates and if the directory is another folder then add that as well.

Another assumption is that there is no space in file name.