How Do You Check If a File Is Modified in Linux?

The modification time can be set by the touch command. If you want to detect whether the file has changed in any way (including the use of touch , extracting an archive, etc.), check whether its inode change time (ctime) has changed from the last check. That’s what stat -c %Z reports.

How can you tell if a file has changed?

How to check if a file has changed?

1. Yes, you can use a hash, or simply check the modified time of the file. You could just have typed you question in a search engine… – …
2. I just typed it into a search engine and I ended up here. A totally legit question and this is the best place for a discussion, imo. –

How do you check when was the file last modified Linux?

2. The find Command

1. 2.1. -mtime and -mmin. -mtime is handy, for example, if we want to find all the files from the current directory that have changed in the last 24 hours: find . – …
2. 2.2. -newermt. There are times when we want to find the files that were modified based on a particular date.