Use of the find command (was: Recent Documents )

[Jonathan Marsden]

On 04/28/2012 09:54 PM, Jean-Pierre Vidal Piesset wrote:

> Is there a way to get a "recent documents" somehow on Lubuntu? I think this
> would be a cool goal to achieve for 12.10 !

> Meanwhile... heeeeeeeeeeeelp!!


The command line is your (powerful) friend.

To find all files modified in the last 7 days in your home directory,
try opening a shell (e.g. bash in LXTerminal) and doing

  find ~ -type f -mtime -7

If necessary, you can even do this (slowly!) for the whole machine,
using something like

  sudo find / -type f -mtime -7

but the list of files you (eventually!) get back could be rather long.

Perhaps more usefully, if you know the "file extension" of the file you
are looking for, you can specify it, so for a list of all Gnumeric
spreadsheets modified in the last 7 days in your home directory, try

  find ~ -type f -mtime -7 -name "*.gnumeric"

and so forth.

This approach is not all pretty and GUI, but it works well if you need
to find files which you edited recently :)

Hoping this provides the "heeeeeeeeeeeelp" you need :)

Jonathan