Ytdyklly

I'm trying to recursively find files that have not been accessed for over 365 days. I can use stat and verify that the file has not been accessed for over 365 days. It is odd that the file shows that it has been changed about 6 months ago, but again stat shows last access was over a year ago.

Then I try using the find command and searching for files that have not been accessed for over a year, but the file I verified is not listed:

skunkbad:/var/www/htdocs/newera$ stat ./index.html

  File: './index.html'

  Size: 31          Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   regular file

Device: 802h/2050d  Inode: 3279283     Links: 1

Access: (0664/-rw-rw-r--)  Uid: ( 1000/skunkbad)   Gid: ( 1001/ webdevs)

Access: 2018-01-08 16:22:58.271143975 -0800

Modify: 2017-09-21 14:01:36.950307771 -0700

Change: 2018-06-04 09:00:36.801632639 -0700

  Birth: -



skunkbad:/var/www/htdocs/newera$ find . -atime +365 -type f -print

skunkbad:/var/www/htdocs/newera$

So, in this case, why isn't this index.html file listed by find? How can I recursively find files that haven't been accessed in over 365 days?

I'm asking because I intend to issue a command that touches these files, but I need to know that it's going to work. Example for 90 days:

find -type f -atime +90 -exec touch -a {} +

The manual for find explains how the time calculations work for the -atime, -ctime and -mtime tests:

-atime n

File was last accessed n*24 hours ago. When find figures out how many
24-hour periods ago the file was last accessed, any fractional part is
ignored, so to match -atime +1, a file has to have been accessed at
least two days ago.

The second part of this is how the numerical argument has been specified:

Numeric arguments can be specified as

+n for greater than n,

-n for less than n,

n for exactly n.

So when you specify -atime +365, find will retrieve the files accessed more than 365 days ago. Because the calculation does not account for fractions, that means a file will only be matched if it has been accessed at least 366 days ago (days, as in 366*24 hours instead of calendar days).

So in your case, find . -atime +365 will match the shown file only after 366*24 hours from the date of access. This condition becomes true after 2019-01-09 16:22:58.