Karen Lewellen wrote: > apparently not quite so simple. No, find is very flavorful. I thought Teemu offered a good explanation, but by necessity not a complete one.
> is find run within quotation marks? No. You may use quotes in certain arguments to it. > what is the difference between newy atime and ctime? atime is access time, the time the file was last accessed. This turns out to usually be a lie, because most people didn't like every read adding a write. ctime is change time, the time the file's metadata (permissions, other things) were last changed. You usually don't want this. Thus, mtime, the last modification time, is almost always what you want. > If I am following, find will share all the files within the specified > window, lets say I want files from 12 may 2026 to 15 may 2026? Let's build it up. All the intermediate steps here will work. You can find files starting in the current directory and all subdirs: find . You can find files starting in the current directory and limited to just this directory: find . -maxdepth 1 You can find files just in this directory that have been modified (written to, including creation) since May 12: find . -maxdepth 1 -newermt 2026-05-12 And you can add a restriction that the files not be more recently modified than May 15: find . -maxdepth 1 -newermt 2026-05-12 ! -newermt 2026-05-15 There are many, many other options to the find command. At the end, it normally produces a list of files. You can send that list through a pipe | command, or use one of the many options listed in the actions section of the find man page. Two of the most common are -ls and -print. -dsr-
