Re: feature request for "find": -newer X Y file

[Thomas Guettler]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 11:32:44AM +0200, Andreas Schwab wrote:
> Thomas Guettler writes:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > The BSD find command has this feature:
> >
> >  -newer X Y file
> >    True if the current file has a more recent last access time ( X = a),
> >    change time ( X = c), or modification time ( X = m) than the last
> >    access time ( Y = a), change time ( Y = c), or modification time ( Y
> >    = m) of file. In addition, if Y = t, then file is instead interpreted
> >    as a direct date specification of the form understood by cvs(1). Note
> >    that -newermm is equivalent to -newer.
> 
> GNU find has all this functionality already, except you can't mix
> different types of times when using files as reference.

The manual[1] has this example:

touch -t 02010000 /tmp/stamp$$
find /usr -newer /tmp/stamp$$
rm -f /tmp/stamp$$

The above example is vulnurable to denial of service attacks. The PID of
the shell script can be guessed. If someone else creates the file
/tmp/stampGUESSEDPID before the code get executed, the timestamp of the
file can be faked, if the above code is run be a non-root user.

I think it is very sad, that you need the "touch". It would be better
if you can give the date as option.

[1]:
http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/manual/html_node/find_html/Comparing-Timestamps.html

-- 
Thomas Guettler, http://www.thomas-guettler.de/
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