Is it possible to list all files on SD card created by a certain application?

Question

I would like to see which files on my SD card a certain application has written. How would I go about doing it?

I don't know how writing files from an application works in Android. But maybe these are possible (in case they are, I would like to know how to do them):

• If a file created by a certain application is owned by an "application user". Then listing all files created by that user would be what I'm looking for.
• If the above is impossible, listing files created within a date range would be a way, as I know which date I installed the application, and that's the only date when it wrote files to the SD card.

Answer 1

Your first request (ownership) won't work on SD card, as the file system (VFAT) does not support that. The second approach however should work:

As we are talking about your SD card, you could of course mount it to your PC for easier work. Steps I describe here should work for Linux systems, and probably Macs as well. To execute them directly on your device without the help of a PC, you can use a terminal app (e.g. Android Terminal Emulator).

# for easier handling, create two files with the timestamps between which to search
touch --date "2012-05-21" /tmp/start
touch --date "2012-05-22" /tmp/end
# now execute the find command to find all files (-type f) in the set time frame
find /mnt/sdcard -type f -newer /tmp/start -not -newer /tmp/end

If you expect a longer list of files, redirect the output of the last command to a file, e.g.:

find /mnt/sdcard -type f -newer /tmp/start -not -newer /tmp/end > /tmp/myfiles.txt

Now you can inspect the generated file.

Of course you can adapt above statements to your needs, e.g. using a different location for the "timestamp files". Once you're done, you can remove those:

rm -f /tmp/start /tmp/end