Looking for a shell one-liner to display the age of a file (in days)

I'd like to see the age of a file (time since last modification) in some human-friendly units (bonus points for things like "yesterday", "2 days ago", "3 years ago", although just a number of days would be sufficient).

Is there a shell one-liner that's simple enough to memorize and type on demand? Is there a tool (packaged for Debian/Ubuntu)? Do I write a custom shell script to do some arithmetic and install it on all the servers I have?

2 Answers

This will display a file's age in days:

age () { stat=$(stat --printf="%Y %F\n" "$1"); echo "The ${stat#* } '$1' is $((($(date +%s) - ${stat%% *})/86400)) days old."; }

Examples:

$ age foo
The regular file 'foo' is 41 days old.
$ age ../bar
The directory '../bar' is 296 days old.
$ age /path/to/baz
The symbolic link '/path/to/baz' is 207 days old.

Further refinement could be done to show the age in months, years, etc.

It close enough to produce a good human readable date ! There is an option for ls --time-style. That let you format the date that will be displayed.

Example

 ls -l --time-style="+%b %_d %Y" -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11359620 Jul 20 2010 file.ext

To prevent typing this hung command you can alias it in your .bashrc file.