Re: Limit qshell find to one subdirectory

[James Rich <james@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 14 Oct 2005, Stefan Tageson wrote:

> Hello Marty,
> > Perhaps you could use ls /QIBM/*.txt
>
> Yes, I can - but one of the benefits of using find is that I can use
> -atime/-ctime to only retrieve some of the files based on last
> accessed/changed date.
> I also guess that someone with more unix knowledge than me can combine
> various of the shell commands to get similar results.

I decided to find out how this could be done using just unix commands. 
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way to do it on iSeries because the 
commands in QSH are quite limited in comparison to the GNU commands 
available in linux and other unix-like OSes.  So while this won't work on 
iSeries, it might be useful or at the very least interesting.

You can use the -u option to ls to sort by access time.  When combined 
with the -lt options it will also show the access time.  From the man page 
for ls:

       -u     with -lt: sort by, and show, access time  with  -l:
              show  access  time and sort by name otherwise: sort
              by access time

You can use the -c option in a similar way to the time of the last 
modification of file status information.  Again from the ls man page:

       -c     with -lt: sort by, and show, ctime  (time  of  last
              modification  of  file status information) with -l:
              show ctime and sort  by  name  otherwise:  sort  by
              ctime

And of course the -t option by itself sorts by modification time (whereas 
-c deals with the modification of file status information).

So far this all works on the iSeries as well.  But here is where we 
require the GNU options that the iSeries does not support.  In order to 
get the times to display in numeric format only use the GNU option 
--full-time which outputs the times in ISO format.  There may be a way to 
do this in QSH but I don't know what it is.

With the times in ISO format we are done with ls and ready to do something 
with the output to limit the list to just those files we are interested 
in.  So far I've only been able to come up with a way to get files for a 
specific regexp pattern.  In order to do something like 'greater than' I 
pretty sure you would have to write a little shell script.  But we can get 
only those files with today's date using grep:

ls -ltur --full-time | grep 2005-10-14

With results similar to:

-rw-------   1 james users      2596 2005-10-14 11:17:10.267615196 -0600 
dead.letter

Which gives us a list of files with possibly more information than you 
want.  We have to use the -l option to ls in order for grep to work so we 
can't leave that off to reduce the amount of output.  But we can use awk 
to print out just the file names:

ls -ltur --full-time | grep 2005-10-14 | awk '{print $9}'

Now we print out just the ninth column of data resulting in:

dead.letter

I'm sure there are more things you could do.  Maybe porting the GNU 
commands wouldn't be a bad idea...   :)

James Rich

It's not the software that's free; it's you.
        - billyskank on Groklaw