From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Jul 15 22:38:17 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4B3C237B404 for ; Tue, 15 Jul 2003 22:38:17 -0700 (PDT) Received: from dan.emsphone.com (dan.emsphone.com [199.67.51.101]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8033443FA3 for ; Tue, 15 Jul 2003 22:38:16 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dan@dan.emsphone.com) Received: (from dan@localhost) by dan.emsphone.com (8.12.9/8.12.9) id h6G5cFnW040184; Wed, 16 Jul 2003 00:38:15 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from dan) Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 00:38:15 -0500 From: Dan Nelson To: David Bear Message-ID: <20030716053815.GC68402@dan.emsphone.com> References: <20030715214133.H18023@asu.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20030715214133.H18023@asu.edu> X-OS: FreeBSD 5.1-CURRENT X-message-flag: Outlook Error User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.4i cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: getting the mdate of a file X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 05:38:17 -0000 In the last episode (Jul 15), David Bear said: > I'd like to run tar using a data incremental. For example, if I run > tar today like this: > tar cvf /dev/nsa0 /home > home.catalog > > I end up with a listing of all files tarr'ed in home.catalog. Then > the next day I'd like to run tar but only have tar select files that > were changed since home.catalog was written. Tar has --newer DATE > option but I would like to set the DATE according to the last > modified time of the home.catalog. > > So, question 1 is how do I get the last mod date of a file? >From the tar infopage: `--newer=DATE' `--after-date=DATE' `-N' When creating an archive, `tar' will only add files that have changed since DATE. If DATE begins with `/' or `.', it is taken to be the name of a file whose last-modified time specifies the date. > Question 2 is, is there a better way that I'm missing? What I did when I used tar for backups was to use the listed-incremental option, which tells tar to create a list of filenames and timestamps, and on subsequent runs, only back up files that differ from the listfile. Worked very well. To do a full backup, just delete the listfile before running tar. -- Dan Nelson dnelson@allantgroup.com