I need to find if any files have been modified within a directory structure. problem is that if you modify a files 5 dir's down it does not modify the top level directory only the parent one level up.

So I think I need to chk for all files recursively but then I will just get a huge long list of files, I only really want to know if files have been modified within top level directory and below recursively.

Have a look here - an old example that recursively goes through a file system structure at or below a chosen directory, and reports only on huge files.

You can change the -s to -M or -C to check file ages, and then act as appropriate - perhaps push all the recent names that you're looking for onto a list ...

thanks Graham, I do use this all the time to find files and it works great but in this scenario I want the perl script to just tell me if only the top level dir has been modified if a file 20 levels down has been modified: e.g

dir1
|_dir2
   |_dir3
      |_dir4

nextdir1
|_nextdir2
   |_nextdir3
      |_nextdir4

if I change a file in dir4 it will print out the file but not change the modified date on dir1 - this will then give me hundreds of files for me to then work out if I can archive the whole of dir1 - is this making any sense?? I want the script to just check the whole of dir1 and all sub dirs (to dir4) and tell me if anything has been modified (-M) within certian ammout of days and just come back with yes files have been modifed with x num of days so cannot archive dir1 then go onto next dir structure.

Many Thanks

OK ... I think I'm with it ...

I would modify that same script I posted, but rather than come up with the specific file name that's changed, I would use a split or regular expression on its full path, and increment a hash of counters ...

if (-M $full < 7.0) {
        @parts = split(/\//,$full);
        $table{$parts[0]}++;
         }

And when you're done, %table will end up with keys for all the top level directories modified ... with a count of the number of items modified in each if that happens to be useful

fantastic works a treat.

Many thanks

Hugo

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