Finding new files

This isn’t so much code as a useful command line trick for finding where a program is storing information.

A fellow programmer needed to find where crontab entries were stored so I showed him this trick. If you need to know where an application is saving state you can follow this simple 3 step process.

Create a file using touch. In this example the file is called TIMESTAMP.

touch TIMESTAMP

Now go about the process of running the application. In his case he edited his crontab entries:

crontab -e

You can then find every file on your hard drive that was modified after the TIMESTAMP file with this command:

find / -newer TIMESTAMP

If you are pretty sure that the data would need to be somewhere underneath your home directory you can use this alternative:

find ~ -newer TIMESTAMP
This entry was posted in TheCodeBook - Snippets. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.
  • iChat Status