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let suppose I have folders with names af32, af42, af, and I want to print the last modification date of all folders whose have af* pattern for example . I writed shell that will take folder or files as parameter and return modification date for that folder . 

stat -c %y "$1"

this code will return the last modification date to folder . but how can I apply this code to more than one folder whose have same pattern in their name

Muh
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2 Answers2

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You can use find to search recursively in search_folder/ for directories (-type d) matching a specific pattern glob (e.g. -name 'af*'):

find search_folder/ -type d -name 'af*' -exec stat -c '%y %n' '{}' \;

This will then execute (-exec ... \;) the command stat -c '%y %n' '{}' on each of the search results, replacing {} with the result path, starting with the given search_folder/.

Note that I modified your stat output to include the file name/path %n in the result, because otherwise you wouldn't see what file each modification date belongs to.

Byte Commander
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  • yes thank you for your reply . the code working fine but for one folder. if I have folders with name af1,af2,af3 that code will give me result just for one folder – Muh Jun 06 '18 at 14:21
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    You have to replace search_folder/ with a parent directory that contains all the folders of which you want the info. Then it will recursively search inside that location and run the stat command on all matching folders below it. – Byte Commander Jun 06 '18 at 14:32
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    More efficient with: -exec … + – dessert Jun 06 '18 at 16:31
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You can use shell globbing as follows:

stat -c %y af*/

af*/ matches every directory in the current directory beginning with “af”.
If this throws an error like

bash: /usr/bin/stat: Argument list too long

use this printf approach instead:

printf '%s\0' af*/ | xargs -0 stat -c %y

Example run

You might want to add %n to stat’s output…

$ ls
af  af32  af42  bf  cg45
$ stat -c %y af*/
2018-06-05 18:59:55.355277977 +0200
2018-06-04 19:01:28.968869600 +0200
2018-06-06 18:58:15.968639269 +0200
$ stat -c '%y %n' af*/
2018-06-05 18:59:55.355277977 +0200 af/
2018-06-04 19:01:28.968869600 +0200 af32/
2018-06-06 18:58:15.968639269 +0200 af42/
dessert
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