How to move the files based on Year

Question

I need to move files based on a year. I used the find command

find /media/WD/backup/osool/olddata/ -mtime +470 -exec ls -lrth {} \;|sort -k6

but for this command to successfully execute i need to know the exact mtime now 470 is just a guess. Means if I can give the year 2012 it gives me files only related to 2012.

So i need advice on how to

Find files based on year e.g 2012 and move them to other directory.

OS release 5.2

FIND version
GNU find version 4.2.27
Features enabled: D_TYPE O_NOFOLLOW(enabled) LEAF_OPTIMISATION SELINUX 

Answer 1

You want to use the -newermt option for find:

find /media/WD/backup/osool/olddata/ -newermt 20120101 -not -newermt 20130101

to get all the files with modification time in 2012.

If your find does not support -newermt you can also do the following to prevent using offset calculations:

touch -d 20120101 /var/tmp/2012.ref
touch -d 20130101 /var/tmp/2013.ref
find /media/WD/backup/osool/olddata/ -newer /var/tmp/2012.ref -not -newer /var/tmp/2013.ref

Manpage

-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.

          ...

          m   The modification time of the file reference
          t   reference is interpreted directly as a time

Answer 2

touch --date=2011-12-31T23:59:59 start
touch --date=2012-12-31T23:59:59 stop
find / -newer start \! -newer stop -printf %Tx" "%p\\n

-exec ls doesn't make any sense.

Answer 3

According to the man page, the argument to -mtime is the number of days you're looking for. You can use date +%j to find the number of days since January 1st of the current year.

Answer 4

You can try to use a combination with the stat and/or date commands as in the following one-liners:

BSD / Mac OS X:

find . -type f -print | while read file; do eval `stat -s "$file"`; year=`date -jf "%s" "+%Y" "$st_mtime"`; dest="/path/to/destination/$year; mkdir -p "$dest"; mv "$file" "$dest"; done

Linux:

find . -type f -print | while read file; do year=`date -r "$file" "+%Y"`; dest="/path/to/destination/$year; mkdir -p "$dest"; mv "$file" "$dest"; done

In both cases the approach is to use the date command to extract the year from the last modification time of every file and then to construct a path with this year. The command mkdir -p will create this path if it doesn't exist already. Of course you can use some other find options to refine your search.

Answer 5

If you do this from the working directory, you can do this instead:

ls -l |awk '{ if ($8 == "2013") print $9 }'

This simplifies things considerably and doesn't cause any overlap. But it also assumes that these files are older than 6 months old, and that ls will print the year instead of the exact time.

For files newer than 6 months old, you'll just have to replace it with this:

ls -l |awk '{ if ($6 == "May") print $9 }' 

or something similar, depending on the month. If you want to create a list of months to move files for (or if you want to create a list for years) do this:

month="May Jun Jul"; 
for i in `echo $month`; 
do 
    for j in `ls -l |awk '{ if ($6 == "'$i'") print $9}'`
    do
        mkdir -p $i
        mv $j $i
    done
done