Writing a setup script that only runs a command if directory hasn't been modified for 1 day

Question

I've got a shell script that performs some tasks using files from a Subversion repository. I would like the Subversion repository to keep up-to-date, but right now the script runs svn up every time which is annoying if I need to run the script several times in a row.

Since svn up changes the last modified timestamp of the .svn directory (even if there were no new commits), I figured that I could use that to make sure it only runs svn up once per day or so.

I tried finding a simple way of just checking whether the .svn directory is older than a day, but there were many seemingly overkill ways of doing it so I thought I'd ask here in case there's actually a very simple way to do it.

Answer 1

This is somewhat simple:

[ `find /path/to/.svn -maxdepth 0 -mtime +1 | wc -l` -gt 1 ] && svn up

Answer 2

Maybe I am missing the big picture here, but can't you just run a once-daily cron job to update the svn repository?

e.g.

crontab -e

then add a

4 * * * /root/updatecron.sh

where updatecron.sh contains

#!/bin/bash
cd /my/directory
/usr/bin/svn up

or something like that?