Linux: Finding Newly Added Files - linux

Question

I am trying to obtain a backup of 'newly' added files to a Fedora system. Files can be copied through a Windows Samba share and appear to retain the original created timestamp. However, because it retains this timestamp I am having issues identifying which files were newly added to the system.
Currently, the only way I can think of doing this is to have a master list snapshot of all the files on the system at a specific time. Then when I perform the backup I compare the previous snapshot with a current snapshot. It would detect files that were removed from the system but it seems excessive and I was thinking there must be an easier way to backup newly added files.
Terry

Answer 1

Try using find. Something like this:
find . -ctime -10
That will give you a list of files and directories, starting from within your current directory, that has had its state changed within the last 10 days.
Example:
My Downloads directory looks like this:
kobus#akira:~/Downloads$ ll
total 2025284
drwxr-xr-x 4 kobus kobus 4096 Nov 4 11:25 ./
drwxr-xr-x 41 kobus kobus 4096 Oct 30 09:26 ../
-rw-rw-r-- 1 kobus kobus 8042383 Oct 28 14:08 apache-maven-3.3.3- bin.tar.gz
drwxrwxr-x 2 kobus kobus 4096 Oct 14 09:55 ELKImages/
-rw-rw-r-- 1 kobus kobus 1469054976 Nov 4 11:25 Fedora-Live-Workstation-x86_64-23-10.iso
-rw------- 1 kobus kobus 351004 Sep 21 14:07 GrokConstructor-master.zip
drwxrwxr-x 11 kobus kobus 4096 Jul 11 2014 jboss-eap-6.3/
-rw-rw-r-- 1 kobus kobus 183399393 Oct 19 16:26 jboss-eap-6.3.0-installer.jar
-rw-rw-r-- 1 kobus kobus 158177216 Oct 19 16:26 jboss-eap-6.3.0.zip
-rw-rw-r-- 1 kobus kobus 71680110 Oct 13 13:51 jre-8u60-linux-x64.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 kobus kobus 4680 Oct 12 12:34 nginx-release-centos-7-0.el7.ngx.noarch.rpm
-rw-r--r-- 1 kobus kobus 3479765 Oct 12 14:22 ngx_openresty-1.9.3.1.tar.gz
-rw------- 1 kobus kobus 16874455 Sep 15 16:49 Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.0.4-102546.vbox-extpack
-rw-r--r-- 1 kobus kobus 7505310 Oct 6 10:29 sublime_text_3_build_3083_x64.tar.bz2
-rw------- 1 kobus kobus 41467245 Sep 7 10:37 tagspaces-1.12.0-linux64.tar.gz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 kobus kobus 42658300 Nov 4 10:14 tagspaces-2.0.1-linux64.tar.gz
-rw------- 1 kobus kobus 70046668 Sep 15 16:49 VirtualBox-5.0-5.0.4_102546_el7-1.x86_64.rpm
Here's what the find returns:
kobus#akira:~/Downloads$ find . -ctime -10
.
./tagspaces-2.0.1-linux64.tar.gz
./apache-maven-3.3.3-bin.tar.gz
./Fedora-Live-Workstation-x86_64-23-10.iso
kobus#akira:~/Downloads$

Answer 2

Most unices do not have a concept of file creation time. You can't make ls print it because the information is not recorded. If you need creation time, use a version control system: define creation time as the check-in time.
If your unix variant has a creation time, look at its documentation. For example, on Mac OS X (the only example I know of¹), use ls -tU. Windows also stores a creation time, but it's not always exposed to ports of unix utilities, for example Cygwin ls doesn't have an option to show it. The stat utility can show the creation time, called “birth time” in GNU utilities, so under Cygwin you can show files sorted by birth time with stat -c '%W %n' * | sort -k1n.
Note that the ctime (ls -lc) is not the file creation time, it's the inode change time. The inode change time is updated whenever anything about the file changes (contents or metadata) except that the ctime isn't updated when the file is merely read (even if the atime is updated). In particular, the ctime is always more recent than the mtime (file content modification time) unless the mtime has been explicitly set to a date in the future.

Answer 3

"Newly added files, Fedora" : The below examples will show a list with date and time.
Example, all installed packages : $ rpm -qa --last
Example, the latest 100 packages : $ rpm -qa --last | head -100
Example, create a text file : $ rpm -qa --last | head -100 >> last-100-packages.txt