Filename Last Modification Date Shell in Script

Print a file's last modified date in Bash

You can use the
stat
command

stat -c %y "$entry"

More info

%y   time of last modification, human-readable

Append a file's last modification date to its name

find . -type f -exec bash -c 'for arg; do arg=${arg#./} mod=$(stat -c %x "$arg") base=${arg%.*} ext=${arg#$base}; echo mv -i "$arg" "${base}_${mod%% *}$ext"; done' _ {} +

(multiline version for readability):

find . -type f -exec bash -c 'for arg; do
  arg=${arg#./} mod=$(stat -c %x "$arg") base=${arg%.*} ext=${arg#$base}
  echo mv -i "$arg" "${base}_${mod%% *}$ext"
done' _ {} +

I left the echo there for you to see what it's going to run before actually running it. Remove it once you're sure you want to move the files.

It adds what you want before the extension but it will completely FAIL if:

• A filename doesn't contain a dot
• That file is in a folder path which does contain a dot

It will also not work properly on files with double extensions, e.g. .tar.gz

Explanation:
I'm passing all files to a bash script with find . -type f -exec bash -c '...' _ {} +
The bash script does the same action for all files: get the modification date, discover the basename and the .extension, then rename the file to basename_date.extension

how to use shell script checking last changed time of a file

You can get the last modification time of a file with stat, and the current date with date. You can use format strings for both to get them in "seconds since the epoch":

current=`date +%s`
last_modified=`stat -c "%Y" $file`

Then, it's pretty easy to put that in a condition. For example:

if [ $(($current-$last_modified)) -gt 180 ]; then 
     echo "old"; 
else 
     echo "new"; 
fi

Displaying Last modification date

It seems you are looking for this:

stat -c %y $filename

Or this:

date -r $filename

Or this (most portable):

fn=$filename perl -e 'print scalar localtime((stat("$ENV{fn}"))[9])'

On the other hand, stat -c %y was already in your post, and you wrote:

Everything works (I think) except it shows more than just the date. What command would I use to just display the date of last modification?

Which makes me think that perhaps you want only the date part? One (lazy) solution for that is using shell commands like cut, awk, sed to extract just what you need, for example:

$ stat -c %y sample.txt
2013-10-12 09:24:08.096820646 -0700
$ stat -c %y sample.txt | cut -f1 -d' '
2013-10-12

A better solution is to generate dates in the desired format, but that depends on the command you used. For example stat cannot do this, but date and perl can, for example:

date +%Y-%m-%d -r $filename

how to extract date only from the creation/modified date of a file?

You can use the date command to extract the modification time of a file by passing it as reference.

date -r filename prints the last modified timestamp of the file.

Sat Jul 3 16:03:53 IST 2021

date +%d -r filename print just the day you asked for, but with a leading zero.

03

date +%-d -r filename prints the day, without a leading zero.

3

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