What is the Best Way to Perform Timestamp Comparison in Bash

Question

I have an alert script that I am trying to keep from spamming me so I\'d like to place a condition that if an alert has been sent within, say the last hour, to not send another

Answer 1

Use "test":

if test file1 -nt file2; then
   # file1 is newer than file2
fi

EDIT: If you want to know when an event occurred, you can use "touch" to create a file which you can later compare using "test".