How To Find Files Newer Than A Specific Date Using Command Line

While doing some server admin tasks the other day I needed to find all the files newer than a certain date. Using just the command line tools it was relatively simple but not obvious, so this is a note to self.

The find utility has an option to find a file newer than another file. By creating an empty file with a specific creation date we can do the search:

touch timestamp -d 2010-01-01

To show all files newer than 2010-01-01 use:

find . -newer timestamp

Or to create a tar archive of them use xargs like so:

find . -newer timestamp | xargs tar -rf /root/filesnewerthan-2010-01-01.tar

Easy.

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