Topic: Duh... moment of the day

[Dumah]

Ever have a problem with software where it just wont do what its supposed to do and you cant work out why?

I've been doing a little scripting and had to pull up a list of what files were accessed in the last 10 minutes. So I knock up a little script that relies on the *nix "find" command, kind of like

find /usr -amin 10

 - basically, what files in the usr directory were accessed in tha last 10 minutes. Now whatever I did it just wouldnt work, sometimes it gave results, but usually it found nothing. I tried to touch some files, create new ones, modify some of them, but no results.

Then, after 30 minutes of messing about I realised i missed the minus sign before the 10.

find /usr -amin -10

Now it works fine...DOH...

[Perspective]

You mean the first command wouldn't tell you all of the files that are going to be modified in the next 10 minutes?

[Dumah]

I guess so...strangely I did get some results for firefox & thunderbird when I ran it for my home directory, so I guess they have a tendancy to mark files for future access 

[Dumah]

Just for info, no minus means exactly that amount of minutes (minus less than, plus greater than)