I need a command that retrieves the last modified date and another that gives the size of a file.
I've looked everywhere, and I cannot find commands like this.
LS will not work.
Unix commands to get last modified date and size of file/folder (NOT LS)
command lineunix
Related Solutions
The parameter atime defines the last access time. Seems you want that? But that is apparently not the same as the date you use in Finder.
See ls -lu for the date atime uses.
Mac OS X also uses the "HFS meta data" (or: "Finder info") to store dates. For example: Unix does not store file creation dates. The cdate in Unix is really the change date (including, for example, changes in access permissions, so cdate gets a new value in slightly different occasions than the modification date for mdate). Using this metadata, Mac OS X can still keep the details.
There are several options to show (some of) those dates, like:
stat file.txt GetFileInfo file.txt mdls file.txt
Using mdfind one can search for specific meta data. But it uses the Spotlight index, so I guess it might not find everything.
Like to find files that are excluded from Time Machine backups:
sudo mdfind "com_apple_backup_excludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"
To search based on the creation date, use kMDItemFSCreationDate. For the last opened date: kMDItemLastUsedDate. But note that files which have been created through certain Terminal commands, may not have that meta data set:
echo "Hello world" > ~/Desktop/hello-world.txt touch ~/Desktop/will-not-be-found.txt mdfind -onlyin ~/Desktop 'kMDItemFSCreationDate >= $time.this_week'
After opening "will-not-be-found.txt" in Text Edit, you'll see the file after all.
See also the Spotlight Query Syntax.
7z a -r "%DATE:~7,2%.%DATE:~4,2%.%DATE:~-4% Backup".7z
Will create the archive with DD.MM.YYYY Backup.7z Format.
Explanation: Echoing %DATE% prints the date in your regional date format setting.
D:\>echo %DATE%
Thu 11/04/2010
By using ~x,y specifier your are doing an in string/substring extraction of the string - where x is the starting character and y number of characters you wish to extract.
On your second point:
I only want to add last modified folder to archive(no matter how many folders exist in directory I just need the latest).
7z u -r "%DATE:~2,2%.%DATE:~5,2%.%DATE:~-4% Backup".7z
should do it.
Best Answer
The most common command for this is
stat(1). Some variants, notably GNU stat, allow specification of the output format, which simplifies parsing.