Bash: How to Find Files Newer than Specific Date or Time

Often you may want to use Bash to find all files in a directory newer than a specific date or time.

The easiest way to do so is by using the newermt statement with the following syntax:

find -newermt 'Aug 15 2024 00:00:00'

This particular example will return all files in the current directory newer than August 15th, 2024 at midnight.

Note that you can also use the following syntax to find files newer than a specific number of days:

find -newermt '5 days ago'

Feel free to replace day with hours, minute, seconds, etc.

The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.

Example: Find Files Newer than Specific Date or Time in Bash

Suppose we use the ls -l statement to first view all files in our current directory along with their most recent modification times:

Now suppose that we would only like to find the files newer than August 15th, 2024 at midnight.

We can use the following syntax to do so:

find -newermt 'Aug 15 2024 00:00:00'

The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:

Bash find files newer than date

This returns the four files that have a modification date more recent than August 15th, 2024 at midnight.

We could also use the following syntax to only find the files that have been modified more recently than 1 hour ago:

find -newermt '1 hour ago'

The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:

Bash find files newer than X hours

This returns the two files with modification times that are newer than 1 hour ago.

Feel free to use similar syntax to find files on your own computer that are more recent than a specific date or time.