Shell – Find files newer than a day and copy

shell-script

I am working on a script that will copy ONLY files that have been created within the last day off to another folder. The issue I am having is the script I have copies all of the files in the source directory instead of just the files less than a day old.

This is what I have:

find . -mtime -1 -exec cp --preserve --parents -a "{}" /somefolder \;

The above code copies all of the files in the source directory. If I remove all of the arguments for 'cp' then it works:

find . -mtime -1 -exec cp "{}" /somefolder \;

The above code copies only the newest files as I want but I need to preserve the attributes using the cp arguments.

I have also tried variables and for loops thinking maybe the -exec option was the issue:

files="$(find -mtime -1)"
for file in "$files"
do
cp --parents --preserve -a file /somefolder

However, the above for loop results in the same issue, all files are copied. If I echo $files only the files I need are shown.

How can I get this to work?

Best Answer

Some implementations of cp have a -t option, so you can put the target directory before the files:

find . -mtime -1 -exec cp -a --parents -t /somefolder "{}" \+

Note that -a implies --preserve so I removed the latter.

Related Solutions

Shell – list all files newer than given timestamp and sort them

find supports a lot of date input formats. The simplest format to obtain is YYYYMMDD HH:MM:SS. You already have the digits in the right order, all you have to do is extract the first group (${timestamp%??????}: take all but the last 6 characters; ${timestamp#????????}: take all but the first 8 characters), and keep going, appending punctuation then the next group as you go along.

timestamp=20130207003851
timestring=${timestamp%??????}; timestamp=${timestamp#????????}
timestring="$timestring ${timestamp%????}"; timestamp=${timestamp#??}
timestring="$timestring:${timestamp%??}:${timestamp#??}"

In bash (and ksh and zsh), but not in ash, you can use the more readable ${STRING_VARIABLE:OFFSET:LENGTH} construct.

timestring="${timestamp:0:8} ${timestamp:8:2}:${timestamp:10:2}:${timestamp:12:2}"

To sort files by date, print out the file names preceded by the dates and sort that, then strip the date prefix. Use -printf to control the output format. %TX prints a part of the modification time determined by X; if X is @, you get the number of seconds since the Unix epoch. Below I print three tab-separated columns: the time in sortable format, the file name, and the time in human-readable format; cut -f 2- removes the first column and the call to expand replaces the tab by enough spaces to accommodate all expected file names (adjust 40 as desired). This code assumes you have no newlines or tabs in file names.

find -maxdepth 1 -type f \
     -newermt "$timestring" -printf '%T@\t%f\t%Tb %Td %TH:%TM\n' |
sort -k1n |
cut -f 2- |
expand -t 40

Shell – Copy a file and append a timestamp

One of your problems is that you left out the double quotes around the command substitution, so the output from the date command was split at spaces. See Why does my shell script choke on whitespace or other special characters? This is a valid command:

cp -a /home/bpacheco/Test1 "/home/bpacheco/Test2-$(date +"%m-%d-%y-%r")"

If you want to append to the original file name, you need to have that in a variable.

source=/home/bpacheco/Test1
cp -a -- "$source" "$source-$(date +"%m-%d-%y-%r")"

If you're using bash, you can use brace expansion instead.

cp -a /home/bpacheco/Test1{,"-$(date +"%m-%d-%y-%r")"}

If you want to copy the file to a different directory, and append the timestamp to the original file name, you can do it this way — ${source##*/} expands to the value of source without the part up to the last / (it removes the longest prefix matching the pattern */):

source=/home/bpacheco/Test1
cp -a -- "$source" "/destination/directory/${source##*/}-$(date +"%m-%d-%y-%r")"

If Test1 is a directory, it's copied recursively, and the files inside the directory keep their name: only the toplevel directory gets a timestamp appended (e.g. Test1/foo is copied to Test1-05-10-15-07:19:42 PM). If you want to append a timestamp to all the file names, that's a different problem.

Your choice of timestamp format is a bad idea: it's hard to read for humans and hard to sort. You should use a format that's easier to read and that can be sorted easily, i.e. with parts in decreasing order of importance: year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and with a separation between the date part and the time part.

cp -a /home/bpacheco/Test1 "/home/bpacheco/Test2-$(date +"%Y%m%d-%H%M%S")"
cp -a /home/bpacheco/Test1 "/home/bpacheco/Test2-$(date +"%Y-%m-%dT%H%M%S%:z")"

Best Answer

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Shell – list all files newer than given timestamp and sort them

Shell – Copy a file and append a timestamp

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