Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 00:38:15 -0500 From: Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com> To: David Bear <David.Bear@asu.edu> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: getting the mdate of a file Message-ID: <20030716053815.GC68402@dan.emsphone.com> In-Reply-To: <20030715214133.H18023@asu.edu> References: <20030715214133.H18023@asu.edu>
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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
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