Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Re: date-specific cp/mv

["Richard Fish" <bigfish@asmallpond.org>]

On 9/29/06, Daniel Iliev <danny@ilievnet.com> wrote:
> tried all the variations, not that it is the exact command. I was also
> very pissed off when I had to discover that the "find manual page" isn't
> very correct. It never made clear that "-ctime 3" means "now plus 3
> days" and "-ctime -3" means "now minus 3 days".

Well the man page does have this paragraph in it (emphasis added):

       If you are using find in an environment  where  security  is  important
       (for example if you are using it to seach directories that are writable
       by other users), you should read the "Security Considerations"  chapter
       of the findutils documentation, which is called Finding Files and comes
       with findutils.   **That document also includes a  lot  more  detail  and
       discussion  than  this  manual  page,  so you may find it a more useful
       source of information.**

So you can get better documentation from the info pages by running
"info find.info".  If you want specifics on the time options:

# info find.info "Finding Files" "Time"

BTW, in programmer speak, "now plus 3 days" would be interpreted as 3
days in the future...which is _not_ how find works.  To try and
clarify:

-mtime 2  -> files modified between 48 and 72 hours ago.
-mtime -2 -> files modified in the last 2 days...the period between 0
and 48 hours ago.
-mtime +2 -> files modified more than 48 hours ago

HTH,
-Richard
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