Unix find -mtime {a negative or postive value}

Question

What do find -mtime -4 and find -mtime +4 do? I cannot understand the examples given in the man page.

Preponderate

Answer 1

As per man page:

-mtime n
    File’s  data was last modified n*24 hours ago.  See the comments
    for -atime to understand how rounding affects the interpretation
    of file modification times.

The argument to -mtime is interpreted as the number of whole days in the age of the file. -mtime +n means strictly greater than, -mtime -n means strictly less than.

So in your case,

-4 meaning less than 4 days.
+4 meaning more than 4 days i.e. 4*24 hours.

Definiendum

Thanks! I got my answer! – Preponderate

Answer 2

Well, I can.

-mtime n

File's data was last modified n*24 hours ago. See the comments for -atime to understand how rounding affects the interpretation of file modification times

find . -mtime 0   # find files modified between now and 1 day ago
                  # (i.e., within the past 24 hours)
find . -mtime -1  # find files modified less than 1 day ago
                  # (i.e., within the past 24 hours, as before)
find . -mtime 1   # find files modified between 24 and 48 hours ago
find . -mtime +1  # find files modified more than 48 hours ago

Malti

Thanks for the solution! But I know this thing. I wanted to know if I give any negative value then what does it mean? – Preponderate

Nope! I used-- find . -mtime -4 & find . -mtime +4 .They are giving different results. – Preponderate

you are absolutley right, sorry and thx for correcting me, after such a long time. – Malti

Answer 3

None of my searches - be they for "negative", "mtime", "strictly" - found the normative text in the man page, but it's there, oy, a quarter of the way through:

   Numeric arguments can be specified as

   +n     for greater than n,

   -n     for less than n,

   n      for exactly n.

But who needs the man page when Google's top match is Stack Overflow, where @SMA and @wgitscht had already given the correct answer? Well, it's nice to know it's de jure and not a happy accident.

Ortensia