Hi, I need to pick up files older than 5 days and then do something (move them, actually). This works fine with the find command. However i do NOT want to look in the subdirectories - how can i prevent the find command from looking there? If that is impossible, is there an alternative approach??? Thanx

try 'man find' take a look at the 'maxdepth' option. Looks to me like that is what you are looking for.

I am using bash 2.03; that option seems not to be available here? Any other suggestions? Thanx, Arne

Arne: If you don't have maxdepth, try this: # find all on one line find . -type f|awk ' gsub("^./","") '|egrep -v "/" provided you execute find in the current directory, find returns files in the form: ./directorypath/filename ./fileinhere Pipe the find command to awk to rid yourself of the beginning ./ and pipe that to egrep to eliminate anything that has a directory / in it. This is terribly inefficient because find still is forced to check the directory structure. If you use Solaris, use nawk instead of awk. Maybe somebody smarter than 1 can come up with a better idea. Regards, Nails Also something like: find /tmp -type f ..... for obvious reasons. Regards, Nails

Thank you, this is indeed an alternative, especially since the underlying directory structure is rather limited. But... Using find seems a bit heavy for the task... Would there be alternatives where the find command is not used altogether? E.g., can we process the timestamp of a file directly as a date, say, after an ls? In that case we would not need the -m option of the find command. thanx for your help.

Well, if directories never have an extension and files always do: find ./*.* -mtime +5 That's a bit of an assumption though. The -prune option has always looked promising but I could never figure out from the man pages exactly what it does.

hm. Prune is not supported in bash (or do i miss something here) and find ./*.* still doesnt seem to work in bash either? bash-2.03$ find ./ -type f -mtime -1 -print ./rd/found bash-2.03$ find ./*.* -type f -mtime -1 -print find: cannot open ./*.*: No such file or directory (even though a file was in there) thanx