On Tue, Aug 29, 2023 at 07:46:16AM -0400, songbird wrote:
> ok, i understand that but my command
>
> $ alias aq='find . -amin -30'
> $ aq
>
> works as it should.
Oh. I guess I should have read the *entire* section of the man page.
relatime
[...]
Since Linux 2.6.30, the kernel defaults to the behavior provided by
this option (unless noatime was specified), and the strictatime
option is required to obtain traditional semantics. In addition,
since Linux 2.6.30, the file’s last access time is always updated
if it is more than 1 day old.
It's that last sentence that changes everything. So then, I guess in
theory Gene *could* search for all of the most recently used files on
his system, and have a snowball's chance in hell of finding the doorbell
audio file that way.
Actually doing that could be trickier than you might guess. If we
limit ourselves to searching one file system (or partial file system,
e.g. the /usr directory) at a time, and therefore don't need to supply
exclude patterns, here's a bash function that might be helpful:
rlartu() {
local day time path
find "${1:-.}" -type f -printf '%A@/%AY-%Am-%Ad/%AT/%p\0' | sort -zn |
while IFS=/ read -rd '' _ day time path; do
printf '%s %s %s\n' "$day" "${time%.*}" "$path"
done
}
I would suggest using this in /home and /usr first, unless Gene can
think of more appropriate starting points.
There's still going to be a whole lotta searching through the haystack
to find the needle. Obviously, knowing the approximate date and time
the file was last read would be of tremendous help, as you can zoom in
on that part of the results.
