Shonky,

Thank you so much for that brilliant answer.

The reason that I was bashing my head against it was because I was convinced that the problem was with the syntax or the string-quoting of the variable being passed into the find command. I hadn't considered the possibility of the results coming back out of the command to be the root cause. Very cool, thank you.

Mark,

You're correct that it looks weird to use "find" to test the age of a file. After googling for the simplest and most reliable way to do that task, everyone on the internet seemed to agree that using the "-mmin" parameter of the find command was the best way. Looking at the built-in parameters to "find", it seems that indeed it's designed to do this very thing, and it does it quite well. The only issue with that method is that a true/false test must be done the way Shonky shows it, not the way I saw it in the first example I found on StackOverflow. Clearly the StackOverflow answer-er didn't test their example code with spaces in the path name.

Canuck,

Thank you so much for the alternative method of testing the file age. That is certainly a more direct way to do the test. I had preferred the simplicity of using the "find" command as a one-liner because the syntax was cleaner.