The SS field may be added independently of the other fields. The minute field MM is required, while the other fields are optional and must be added in the following order: Where cc is the first two digits of the year (the century), yy is the last two digits of the year, the first mm is the month (from 01 to 12), dd is the day of the month (from 01 to 31), HH is the hour of the day (from 00 to 23), MM is the minute (from 00 to 59), and SS is the seconds (from 00 to 59). Time comparisons using both file times is useful when pax is used to create a time based incremental archive (only files that were changed during a specified time range will be archived).Ī time range is made up of six different fields and each field must contain two digits. T - the -Time option selects files for the target archive (or merely to copy when used with -wr) based on their /modification or inode /change (or both) times.

verbose - for reporting on files sourced/targeted. s/src regex/replace/ - which modifies filenames in-stream X for restricting pax to the same source device and/or filesystem. link - which creates hard-links if at all possible rather than copying the file-data. wr - when pax is handed both -write and -read options it copies. In summary, if you ever need to copy a directory on a Unix/Linux system and save the date/time information for all of the files, the -pr options are what you need.You can use pax for this like: pax -wrT '11$(date +%H%M),'.

Access Control Lists (ACLs) and Extended Attributes (EAs), including resource forks, will also be preserved. Here’s part of the man page from the cp -p option on MacOS:Ĭause cp to preserve the following attributes of each source file in the copy: modification time, access time, file flags, file mode, user ID, and group ID, as allowed by permissions. I just ran that command from the MacOS Terminal, but it will work the same way on Linux systems. For instance, I just used this cp command to copy a directory named OldDir to a new directory named NewDir, while retaining all of the date/time file information: If you need to copy a directory on Unix/Linux and want to preserve the date/time information while copying the directory and files, use the -p option to save the date/time information, and the -r option to copy the directory properly.

Ubuntu find files by date