Gfilui

let suppose I have folders with names af32, af42, af, and I want to print the last modification date of all folders whose have af* pattern for example .
I writed shell that will take folder or files as parameter and return modification date for that folder .

stat -c %y "$1"

this code will return the last modification date to folder .
but how can I apply this code to more than one folder whose have same pattern in their name

You can use find to search recursively in search_folder/ for directories (-type d) matching a specific pattern glob (e.g. -name 'af*'):

find search_folder/ -type d -name 'af*' -exec stat -c '%y %n' '' ;

This will then execute (-exec ... ;) the command stat -c '%y %n' '' on each of the search results, replacing with the result path, starting with the given search_folder/.

Note that I modified your stat output to include the file name/path %n in the result, because otherwise you wouldn't see what file each modification date belongs to.

You can use shell globbing as follows:

stat -c %y af*/

af*/ matches every directory in the current directory beginning with “af”.

If this throws an error like

bash: /usr/bin/stat: Argument list too long

use this printf approach instead:

printf '%s' af*/ | xargs -0 stat -c %y

Example run

You might want to add %n to stat’s output…

$ ls
af af32 af42 bf cg45
$ stat -c %y af*/
2018-06-05 18:59:55.355277977 +0200
2018-06-04 19:01:28.968869600 +0200
2018-06-06 18:58:15.968639269 +0200
$ stat -c '%y %n' af*/
2018-06-05 18:59:55.355277977 +0200 af/
2018-06-04 19:01:28.968869600 +0200 af32/
2018-06-06 18:58:15.968639269 +0200 af42/