Hi,

I am trying to return a list of files in a directory older than say 2 minutes and want the files ordered by modification date.

If I try something based on ls -ltr, then I have to pick the date from their and convert to compare to the current date.

If I try something based on find, is their a way to sort the resulting files based on their modification date

In either case, then I will want to process the files one by one

thanks for any info
Denny

I would use find to get the list of files older than 2 minutes by aging a comparison file.  There is a startup penalty while the script waits for the comparison file to reach the desired age of two minutes.  But if you want to do this repeatedly every two minutes (like the script below), then it is not an issue.

Of course the find command will return these filenames in whatever sequence.  To get them time-sequenced, I pipe them into an ls command.

#!/bin/ksh

touch /tmp/myscript.run

while true
  do
  touch /tmp/2minutesago
  sleep 119
  for fn in $(find . -type f ! -newer /tmp/2minutesago | xargs ls -tr)
    do
    echo "Do someting with: $fn"
    done
  if [ ! -f /tmp/myscript.run ] ; then
     echo 'Quitting because /tmp/myscript.run is gone'
     break
  fi
  done

exit 0

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with linux:
for f in $(ls -tr $(find . -type f -maxdepth 1 -cmin +2))
do
something
done

Good tip.

-amin -cmin -mmin -cnewer -iname -iregex -regex

I see a lot of good find options in linux - wish I had some of these in HP-UX.