<p>I have an alert script that I am trying to keep from spamming me so I'd like to place a condition that if an alert has been sent within, say the last hour, to not send another alert.  Now I have a cron job that checks the condition every minute because I need to be alerted quickly when the condition is met but I don't need to get the email every munite until I get the issue under control.  What is the best way to compare time in bash to accomplish this?</p>

Use "test":
```
```
if test file1 -nt file2; then
   # file1 is newer than file2
fi
```
```
EDIT: If you want to know when an event occurred, you can use "touch" to create a file which you can later compare using "test".