What's the Bash command recent files?

Question

I want to find all files that are:

• recent
• do not end in .class
• no directories

This is what I have attempted but it is not working:

find . \( -atime -1 -a \! -type d -a \! -name '.class' \) -ls

I simplified it to this:

find . -atime -1 -ls

But it is still picking up things from January and earlier. What is going wrong here?

Answer 1

You probably want either -mtime or -ctime. -atime checks the access time, which includes accessing the file metadata. So doing a ls (or a find -atime) will update the access time. -mtime is the time the file contents were last modified and -ctime is the last time the "status" was changed, which I think is the file metadata (permissions, etc).

Answer 2

Solutions use:

find . -ctime -1 -ls