sh - Find a file that was created within five days of another file in shell

Question

i'm still pretty new to scripting so stick with me and if you have any questions please feel free to ask.

Okay, so: I have a file let's say file.txt

file.txt exists in a directory /this/is/the/directory/file.txt

In a separate directory .log files exist that tell me what happens when file.txt was created.

fuubar.log, fuu.log, bar.log, this.log, that.log, some.log, other.log...there is an unknown number of these logs.

I need to gather all the log files that occurred +-5 days of the file.txt file being created.

For example: file.txt was created on 7 July 2013 (don't pay any attention to date format) I need the log files that occurred on and between 2 July 2013 and 12 July 2013.

Any ideas?

EDIT: I'm more confused about comparing the dates of the files to get the correct ones, i know how to copy files.

Perl and stat are not available to me

Answer 1

Well something to get your started unless someone posts a one-liner!

# Get the date in you want to start listing files from using your
# sample file. This will assign the variable in the format of MMDDYYYY
$ start=$(date -d "-5 days" '+%m%d%Y' < <(date -r /this/is/the/directory/file.txt))

# Get the date in you want to end listing files from. using your
# sample file. This will assign the variable in the format of MMDDYYYY
$ end=$(date -d "+5 days" '+%m%d%Y' < <(date -r /this/is/the/directory/file.txt))

# Create two temp files. touch -t will force the timestamp on
# these files to match the content of variables
$ touch -t "$start" /tmp/s$$
$ touch -t "$end" /tmp/e$$

# Use these temp files timestamp as a pivot mechanism by find commands
# newer option. This will list files whose timestamp is in between our 
# temp files timestamp which we captured from your sample file
$ find /path/to/files -type f -newer /tmp/s$$ -and -not -newer /tmp/e$$