Can someone help me decipher this? This is from an older Unix script, not sure exactly what it does:

...
find . $DATA -newer $DATESTAMP -exec stat -m {} \; > $FILELIST
...

$DATA is a list of files in a directory
$DATESTAMP is just a file with an old date
$FILELIST is just a file

from what I understand, this line will find all files (in the current directory) that are newer than $DATESTAMP's date.
for each file found, it will exec the "stat -m" command on it.
The results are written to $FILELIST.

this is where I'm confused, what actually gets written to $FILELIST? file names or when it was last modified? why would you want to exec "stat -m" on it? isn't "find ... - newer" enough to get the file names?

Thanks for any help

What is being outputted to $FILELIST is
not just a list of file(name)s but also
additional information about those files.

stat(1) is a GNU utility. On your Linux
system type "info stat" to get full
information on what "stat -m" outputs.

-F

thanks for the input :)

but from what I understand, the command line "stat -m" would only return information regarding the modification of the file. At least that's what someone on this forum told me (thank you!), but I can't find that option detailed anywhere.

I'm 99% sure this isn't the stat struct that the Unix "man stat" returns.

RedHat 8.0 doesn't have that command line utility anymore, so I installed it via RPM - however, "-m" wasn't a possible option when I did an "info stat".

I think I understand that this script is supposed to write out the filenames, but that stat command confuses me. From the rest of the script, this file gets parsed up and each line instance of $FILELIST is called to be copied.

So maybe "stat -m" gets something else?

"I'm 99% sure this isn't the stat struct that the Unix "man stat" returns."

Well, stat is a C library command, so its standard, especially among GNU components. I don't remember an -m flag though. stat used to be commonly interfaced similarly with lstat and fstat (which still exist for POSIX support), though now stat -l and stat -f perform the same functions on many Linux distributions.

For the information you want, call "stat -c --%y [filename]". %z would provide you the time of last change, as in file permissions, not data (%y).
GNU stat

find . will recursively list all files and directories at . and below (as you can observe by running "find ."). Perhaps it is "find $DATA"?

you can gain a better understanding of find by "man find" - look for "-newer"

you can determine the the acceptable "stat" options by "man stat" and verify the options by running: stat --help or stat -?

in my case, stat -m file gives
stat: invalid option -- m