FIND-FILTER(1) General Commands Manual FIND-FILTER(1)

find-filter - fine-grained file selection based on time attributes

$PCP_BINADM_DIR/find-filter [-v?] predicate

find-filter is a filter for a list of file names read on standard input, and if the files match the predicate their names are written on standard output.

The supported predicate forms are based on the file's creation time or modification time, and take the form ctime or mtime followed by a time specification. A time specification takes the form of a + or - followed by days (a non-negative integer), optionally followed by a colon (:) and hours (an integer in the range 0 to 23), optionally followed by another colon (:) and minutes (an integer in the range 0 to 59).

The semantics of the time specification are that a file matches the predicate if the chosen time attribute for the file is less than (+) the current time minus the time specification, else more than or equal to (-) the current time minus the time specification. Alternatively, + means before the current time minus the time specification, and - means at or after the current time minus the time specification.

find-filter is intended to be used to provide finer-grain and platform independent selection compared to the -mtime or -ctime options of find(1). find-filter is expected to be used as a post-filter for the output from find(1), and this is how it is used in the pmlogger_daily(1) scripts to select files to be compressed or culled.

The following predicate examples illustrate some typical uses.

Matches files modified more than 3 days ago.
Matches files created in the last 2 hours.
Matches files created more than 15 minutes ago.

There are none, unless the -v option is used, in which case some diagnostics are written to standard error.

Exit status is always zero, unless there are errors found when parsing the command line arguments.

find(1) and pmlogger_daily(1).

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