Question

I’m trying to do a simple check in a bash build script to check if the built file XML is newer than the component xml files in a directory.

So basically I have a src/ directory with 10 XML files and a final.xml that is built from those files.

What would be a simple way to check the modification time of the final.xml to ensure it is older than the files in src/.

Something similiar to ANT’s

    <uptodate property="xml.build.notRequired" targetfile="${final.xml}">
        <srcfiles dir="${src.dir}" includes="**/*.xml" />
    </uptodate>

Or the basic functionality of a Make file (but I’d rather just do it in the script than add Make/ANT as a dependency).

Answer 1

find src -type f | while read filename; do
    if [ "$filename" -nt "final.xml" ]; then
        echo "Oh noes, final.xml is out of date..."
    fi
done