Fast way to check timestamp of files in directory tree

Question

I need to check file structure in directory tree every second, but my script is taking too long as I suspect collecting timestamps and calculating base64 from it's name takes some time in large directory tree.

How can I gather tree structure, then store them in array, and loop through each file collecting their timestamp in array, where the array key is a cipher from file path?

Later I'm comparing the array to older version and that adds additional wasted time, so I would like to improve the efficiency.

shopt -s globstar dotglob
files=("$base"/**)


new() {
    keys=("${!files_new[@]}")
    for i in "${keys[@]::2}"
    do 
        unset "files_new[$i]"
    done

    for file in "${files[@]}" 
    do
        stamp=$(stat -c "%Y" "$file")
        hash=$(echo "$file" | base64)

        files_new[$hash]=$stamp
    done   
}

Answer 1

I have achieved faster probing by using Find command with -printf output as suggested by Peter Cordes. The loop went from 3 seconds to about 300 milliseconds.

loop() {
    while read string
    do
        stamp=${string%|*}
        file=${string#*|}

        files_new[$file]=$stamp
    done < <(find "${base}" -name "*" -printf "%TD%TT|%p\n")
}