I sometimes need to see only the files created or modified today in a directory. On a Linux system, you can pipe the output of the ls command into the grep command looking for just today's date in the input to the grep command as shown below:
$ ls -al --time-style=+%D ~/Documents/*.zip | grep $(date +%D) -rw-r--r--. 1 joe joe 269338 01/12/18 /home/joe/Documents/gloves.zip $
You can specify how the date is displayed with +format
where format is a particular format in which you want the date
displayed - see
Formatting the output from the date command on a Linux system. If you
use +%D, the date will be displayed as m/d/y, i.e.,
month/day/year, e.g. 01/12/18 for January 12, 2018. By then using the
grep command to search for that value, you can limit the displayed files
to only those created or modified today.
Alternatively, you can use the
find command with the
newermt option as shown below to display only those files created
or modified today - see
Finding files modified today.
$ find ~/Documents -maxdepth 1 -type f -newermt 2018-01-12 /home/joe/Documents/gloves.zip $
In this case, today is January 12, 2018, so I specify today's date
with the -newermt option to display only the files
created/modified on or after that date, i.e., today. The find
command is looking at the modification time, but if a file was created today,
it was obviously last modified today. By adding the
-maxdepth 1 option, I only look in the top level directory and
not subdirectories. If I omit that option, all subdirectories beneath the
specified directory will also be checked. By adding -type f,
I specify that I only want to see files created/modified today. If I
omitted that option, I would also see any directories created or modified
today.
You can also use the find command to find those files
created or modified within the last 24 hours with the -mtime -1
as shown below:
$ find ~/Documents -maxdepth 1 -type f -mtime -1 /home/jim/Documents/coats.zip /home/jim/Documents/gloves.zip $
You can also use -daystart with -mtime -1 to
see only the files created or modified today. But you need to put the
-daystart option prior to the -mtime -1 option
to measure time from the beginning of today rather than the last 24 hours
as you would get with -mtime -1 alone.
$ ls -al ~/Documents/*.zip -rw-rw-r--. 1 joe joe 1297732 Jan 11 23:00 /home/joe/Documents/coats.zip -rw-rw-r--. 1 joe joe 269338 Jan 12 22:14 /home/joe/Documents/gloves.zip -rw-rw-r--. 1 joe joe 483364 Jan 10 11:00 /home/joe/Documents/hats.zip $ find ~/Documents -maxdepth 1 -type f -mtime -1 /home/joe/Documents/coats.zip /home/joe/Documents/gloves.zip $ find ~/Documents -maxdepth 1 -type f -mtime -1 -daystart /home/joe/Documents/coats.zip /home/joe/Documents/gloves.zip $ find ~/Documents -maxdepth 1 -type f -daystart -mtime -1 /home/joe/Documents/gloves.zip $