mjhjmtu

I was hoping someone can point me in the right direction. I would like to create a script to check for new files (files with today's date) within a directory and then print the results to a text file. Could I use cron or bash?

edit:
Updated original thread. I tried the following on my Linux Mint VM and I got it to work. The only problem is:

1) when i create a new file (using "sudo vi newtextfile.txt" and then ":w") i receive the notification email 4 times.

2) am i triggering multiple IN_CREATE events by creating a new file using the method i mentioned above?

/xyz/jon >>>
total 12
786436 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jul 13 20:43 .
786434 drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jul 13 19:45 ..
786441 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 48 Jul 13 20:32 mylogger.sh
786437 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jul 13 20:22 mylogtoday.txt


"incron.table-jonincron" >>>
/xyz/client IN_CREATE /xyz/jon/mylogger.sh


/xyz/jon/mylogger.sh >>>
sudo mail -s "testing script" emailaddress@domain.com

Do you want something that monitors a directory? incron can be quite handy for that:

1. Install incron from a repo

2. Enable incrond:

sudo systemctl enable incrond.service
sudo systemctl start incrond.service

3.Create appropriate incrontab:

incrontab -e

and add as content:

/path/to/watch IN_CREATE /path/to/mylogger.sh $@/$#

4.Create the logger script:

cat <<EOF>> /path/to/mylogger.sh
#!/bin/bash
echo $1 >> /path/to/logfile
EOF
chmod +x /path/to/mylogger.sh

Thats it.

Hello I was hopping someone with better skill could answer. HP-UX has quite an old System V toolbox so you will not have the recent GNU tools.

HP-UX posix shell, which is /usr/bin/sh is very close to ksh93. So you can compare the age of two files with [[ file1 -nt file2 ]] wich returns true if file1 is newer than file2. Don't use /usr/bin/ksh on HP-UX it is a very old standard korn-shell (perhaps 1982).

Here is a simple script that you can run periodically. It should be hardened better to support files with specials characters in the names and other possible errors but I'm not good at that.

The files being watched are in DIR, the new files list is /tmp/newfile. The list is created while comparing all the file in DIR to the youngest file found during the last run so it supports new files being created while it runs.
The script does not support multiple execution at the same time, you may have to implement locks or to space each execution with enough time.

#!/usr/bin/sh

previous=/tmp/previous
new=/tmp/newfiles
DIR=/tmp/aa

if [[ ! -s $new ]]
then
 mv "$new" "$previous"
fi

if [[ ! -f "$previous" ]]
then
 ls -rt "$DIR" > "$new"
 exit
fi

ref=$(tail -1 "$previous")

if ! cd "$DIR"
then
 echo cannot cd "$DIR"
 exit 1
fi

ls -rt | while read file
do
 if [[ "$file" -nt "$ref" ]]
 then
 echo "$file"
 fi
done > "$new"

You could run it in cron, for instance :

every five minutes (note that hp-ux crontab do not support *5 syntax)

0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,55 * * * * /myscript.sh >>/var/adm/myscript.log 2>&1

every hour

0 * * * * /myscript.sh >>/var/adm/myscript.log 2>&1

once a day

0 0 * * * /myscript.sh >>/var/adm/myscript.log 2>&1