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I can use
find . -mmin -5
to find files changed in last 5 minutes. However, if I try to find files with modification time in the future by giving negative number find refuses to do it:
find . -mmin --1
Is there a way to give future modification time to the standard Linux find?
To find files modified at least 5 days in the future, use:
find . -newermt "5 days"
The syntax for the time specification corresponds to the one for date -d. See man find for info on the switch named -newerXY for more information.
It is not possible to use e.g. -mmin to do this. It was reported as a bug against GNU find, and was solved by implementing -newerXY in findutils 4.3.3 (~2007) as I showed above.
Apparently it was not GNU find that was used, but BusyBox.
You should then be able to create a temporary file with touch -d and a date in the future and then use the -newer switch for find such as:
touch -d "+5 days" tmpfile
find . -newer tmpfile
BusyBox touch does not support that date format, but the principle is the same and its find supports -newer. Creating the reference file with a correct date is left as an exercise for the reader (always convenient to write).
configure script complained about things being in the future (by an hour and a half or so still): find . -newermt '1 hour' | xargs touch -d '-9 hours' and I can continue. :-)
May 20, 2014 at 15:21