With one ear carefully tuned to cries of desperation from the Internet, it's no wonder I picked up on this plea from David Nides on Twitter:

Request today, we need 2 scan XX terabytes of data across 3k file shares 4any files that have not been MAC since 2012. Then move files to x.— David Nides (@DAVNADS) March 13, 2013

Whenever I see a request to scan for files based on a certain criteria and then copy them someplace else, I immediately think of the "find ... | cpio -pd ..." trick I've used in several other Episodes.

Happily, "find" has "-mtime", "-atime", and "-ctime" options we can use for identifying the files. But they all want their arguments to be in terms of number of days. So I need to calculate the number of days between today and the end of 2012. Let's do that via a little command-line kung fu, shall we? That will make this more fun.

$ days=$(( ($(date +%Y) - 2012)*365 + $(date +%j | sed 's/^0*//') ))
$ echo $days
447

Whoa nelly! What just happened there? Well, I'm doing math with the bash "$(( ... ))" operator and assigning the result to a variable called "days" so I can use it later. But what's all that line noise in the middle?

• "date +%Y" returns the current year. That's inside "$( ... )" so I can use the value in my calculations.
• I subtract 2012 from the current year to get the number of years since 2012 and multiply that by 365. Screw you, leap years!
• "date +%j" returns the current day of the year, a value from 001-365.
• Unfortunately the shell interprets values with leading zeroes as octal and errors out on values like "008" and "097". So I use a little sed to strip the leading zeroes.

Hey, I said it would be fun, not that it would necessarily be a good idea!

But now that I've got my "$days" value, the answer to David's original request couldn't be easier:

$ find /some/dir -mtime +$days -atime +$days -ctime +$days | cpio -pd /new/dir

The "find" command locates files whose MAC times are all greater than our "$days" value-- that's what the "+$days" syntax means. After that, it's just a matter of passing the found files off to "cpio". Calculating "$days" was the hard part.

My final solution was short enough that I tweeted it back to David. Which took me all the way back to the early days of Command-Line Kung Fu, when Ed Skoudis had hair would tweet cute little CMD.EXE hacks that he could barely fit into 140 characters. And I would respond with bash code that would barely line wrap. Ah, those were the days!

Of course, Tim was still in diapers then. But he's come so far, that precocious little rascal! Let's see what he has for us this time!

Holy Guacamole! This is FINALLY an easy one! Robocopy makes this super easy *and* it plays well with leap years. I feel like it is my birthday and I can finally get out of these diapers.

PS C:\> robocopy \some\dir \new\dir /MINLAD (Get-Date).DayOfYear /MINAGE (Get-Date).DayOfYear /MOV

Simply specify the source and destination directories and use /MOV to move the files. MINLAD will ignore files that have been accessed in the past X days (LAD = Last Access Date), and MINAGE does the same based on the creation date. All we need is the number of days since the beginning of the year. Fortunately, getting that number is super easy in PowerShell (I have no pity for Hal).

All Date objects have the property DayOfYear which is (surprise, surprise) the number of days since the beginning of the year (Get-Member will show all the available properties and methods of an object). All we need is the current date, which we get Get-Date.

DONE! That's all folks! You can go home now. I know you expected a long complicated command, but we don't have one here. However, if you feel that you need to read more you can go back and read the episodes where we cover some other options available with robocopy.

This command is so easy, simple, and short I could even fit it into a tweet!