Determining age of a file in shell script

Question

G\'day,

I need to see if a specific file is more than 58 minutes old from a sh shell script. I\'m talking straight vanilla Solaris shell with some POSIX extensions i

Answer 1

I needed something to test age of a specific file, to not re-download too often. So using GNU date and bash:

# if file's modtime hour is less than current hour:
[[ $(date +%k -r GPW/mstall.zip) -lt $(date +%k) ]] && \
wget -S -N \
http://bossa.pl/pub/metastock/mstock/mstall.zip \

Update--this version works much better for me, and is more accurate and understandable:

[[ $(date +%s -r mstall.zip) -lt $(date +%s --date="77 min ago") ]] && echo File is older than 1hr 17min

The BSD variant (tested on a Mac) is:

[[ $(stat -f "%m" mstall.zip) -lt $(date -j -v-77M +%s) ]] && echo File is older than 1hr 17min