Find the files that have been changed in the last 24 hours
To find all files modified in the last 24 hours (last full day) in a particular specific directory and its sub-directories:
find /directory_path -mtime -1 -ls
The - before 1 is important – it means anything changed one day or less ago. A + before 1would instead mean anything changed at least one day ago, while having nothing before the 1would have meant it was changed exacted one day ago, no more, no less.
find . -mtime 0 -printf '%T+\t%s\t%p\n' 2>/dev/null | sort -r | more
On GNU-compatible systems (i.e. Linux):
find . -mtime 0 -printf '%T+\t%s\t%p\n' 2>/dev/null | sort -r | more
This will list files and directories that have been modified in the last 24 hours (-mtime 0). It will list them with the last modified time in a format that is both sortable and human-readable (%T+), followed by the file size (%s), followed by the full filename (%p), each separated by tabs (\t).
2>/dev/null throws away any stderr output, so that error messages don’t muddy the waters; sort -r sorts the results by most recently modified first; and | more lists one page of results at a time.
Add a -name option to find specific file types, for instance:
find /var -name "*.php" -mtime -1 -ls
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