Snippet: Copying only modified files within X days

The following spinet allows you to copy only modified within the last 7 days (from the current date) to a predefined destination.

find /var/log -d -mtime -7 -exec cp {} /home/user/modified_logs \;

The -mtime command specifies the time (in days) of how far you wish to span back.

You can also check for files that have been accessed with the '-atime' switch and similarly the creation time with 'ctime'.

The '-exec' switch allows us to execute a custom command (in this case cp) and transplant the output of the find command into the custom cp command (i.e. {})

Finally we need to use end the exec portion with '\;'