General Unix Tips

Finding the disk space used in the last x days

How much disk space is taken up by the files in my home directory changed in the last day? (useful for backup calculations):

find ~ -mtime -1 -printf '%k\n' | awk '{ sum+=$1 } END { print sum }'

• -mtime -1 matches files with modification time in the last 1 day;
• -printf '%k\n' prints the file size in KB on a line;
• The awk script simply sums all the lines.

Increase the negative value for mode days, e.g. for 1 month:

find ~ -mtime -31 -printf '%k %p\n' | grep -vi cache | awk '{ sum+=$1 } END { print sum }

This uses GNU find syntax; BSD find syntax may be different.

Archiving files selected with find

Similar to the above example, this archives all files which have a modification time in the last 180 days:

find ~ -type f -mtime -180 -print0 | bsdtar cvjf last180days.tbz --null -T -

The -T - option to bsdtar causes the list of files to be archived to be read from standard input. The -type f causes files only to be added to the list (otherwise find will pass on directories, and tar will archive everything under the directory - even duplicates…)

Note the use of -print0 on find and the matching --null on bsdtar: these use null characters to seperate file names instead of white space, which means that file names in the list with white space or special characters (even newlines or glob characters like */./?) will not break things.

Excluding a path in find

Select the path with the -path predicate and exclude it with the -prune action. This also requires you to use a boolean or with the non-prune action you want to do; for example, to print the files in ../foo/bar except ../foo/bar/cache:

find ../foo/bar -path ../foo/bar/cache -prune -o -print

(On some versions of find, it will assume -print if the only action is -prune)

Note that the prune path is matched against the start of the path string, so it must be specified in the same way (both absolute, or both using the same relative directory).

Also, if you are specifying other matching criteria, use parentheses to make sure the order of operations is kept. Inside a shell (i.e. nearly all the time) you must escape the parentheses (\( \)).

Neatly printing the modification time of a file

echo foo was last modified on `stat /path/to/foo | awk '/Modify/ { print $2 }'`

Often useful to go together with a script run occasionally - if the script doesn’t modify anything itself you can touch a file and use the modification time to show the user the time since the last run:

echo Last ran foo on `stat $HOME/.var/foo | awk '/Modify/ { print $2 }'`
...
touch $HOME/.var/foo