Check the modification date of a file and compare it to the current date

Question

Hey everyone,
I'm writing a script that compares the modification date of a file to the current date, and performs actions based on whether the file was modified 7 days ago or not. I haven't been able to figure out exactly how to do this.
I haven't been able to find much in the way of this online, and I am not that familiar with manipulating dates and whatnot. I was able to get a bit of it, posted below:
currentDate=`date +%b-%d`
fileDate=`ls -l ~/.backup.txt | awk '{ print $6, $7 }'`
echo "$fileDate"
echo "$currentDate"
if [ "$fileDate" <= "$currentDate" ]; then
echo "old enough to run script"
else
echo "not old enough yet"
fi
Of course, this doesn't work. Any help would be much appreciated. This is for Leopard.
TIA,
Andrew

Answer 1

find ~/.backup.txt -mtime +7 -exec yourscript {} ;
You may need to play with the +7 value to get the exact number of days old the file needs to be.
The find command will accept a directory (actually it is frequently used with directories) and will find all files in that directory and any subdirectories below that match the find selection critiera.
So you could do something like
find ~ -mtime +7 | xargs yourscript
or
find ~ -mtime +7 -name "*.txt" | xargs yourscript
and if your script does not accept multiple filenames on the command line, you can use
find ~ -mtime +7 | xargs -n 1 yourscript
and if your file names have spaces in them, you can use
find ~ -mtime +7 -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 yourscript