simple rm script

[Tamera Street]

I need to rm all txt files in a certain dir every night. Can you give me some suggestions on how to do this?

[David Bellamy]

rm *.txt

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Tamera:

Please define what you mean by "txt" --- an extension to a filename? --- an ASCII file as opposed to a binary one?

Do you want to recursively descend a directory?

Do you need help with the process of selecting and removing? Do you need help setting up a 'crontab'?

Regards!

...JRF...

[Calandrello]

Friend

Script follows one that and safer than to execute rm *.txt :

for G in `ll |grep .sh |awk '{print $9}'`
do
rm $G
done

[spex]

Hi Tamera,

In this example, a cron job, which will be run as root, is scheduled. The job deletes all .txt files in /yourdir and its subdirectories at 11:00pm every day.

# grep -q root /var/adm/cron/cron.allow || echo root >> /var/adm/cron/cron.allow
# crontab -l root > /tmp/crontab.root
# echo "00 23 * * * find /yourdir -name '*.txt' -type f -exec rm -f {} 1> /dev/null \;" >> /tmp/crontab.root
# crontab < /tmp/crontab.root
# rm -f /tmp/crontab.root

For obvious reasons, care must be taken with a job such as this.

PCS

[Dennis Handly]

>Calandrello Script follows one that and safer than to execute rm *.txt

I'm not sure how this is safer or how it is "txt"? Also did you want to escape the "."?

But you can improve your script:
for G in $(ls | fgrep .sh); do rm $G; done
But this is the same as: rm *.sh.
Unless you really wanted to remove *.sh* files?

>spex
00 23 * * * find /yourdir -name '*.txt' -type f -exec rm -f {} 1> /dev/null \;

Any reason you want to redirect stdout from the rm command? You don't get anything, only to stderr. Did you mean "2>"?

[Tamera Street]

The txt is a extension - data.txt I know how to do this by command line everyday but my scripting is limited. I would like to put this in a crontab to run everynight.

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

Scripting is no different than typing the command(s) interactively. If you type one command such as:

rm /var/tmp/specialdir/*.txt

then you simply add that to crontab and pick a time at night to run this command. If there are multiple commands needed, put them into a file, add an interpreter line at the top and make it executable. Then add the full path to the script to crontab. Something like this:

#!/usr/bin/sh
rm /var/tmp/specialdir1/*.txt
rm /var/tmp/specialdir2/*.txt
rm /var/tmp/specialdir3/*.txt

[Frank de Vries]

Tamara,
For me rm is rather silent.

I would prefer to embedd the rm command inside a find and log this. This would
improve security and visability.

The crontab entry would look like this:
(10 minutes before midnight, every day of the week)

50 23 * * * /root/adm/bin/text_clean.sh > /root/adm/logs/text_clean.log 2>&1

The script would look like this:
vi text_clean.sh

#!/sbin/sh
# Script to clean txt files by Tamara

find /path/textfiles -name "*txt" -type f -print -exec rm {} \;

#end of script

Now you could at a later stage , put a time
criteria in your find. For example to delete only the *.txt files older then 1 day.
The find command would look like this:

find /path/textfiles -name "*txt" -type f -mtime +1 -print -exec rm {} \;

You can also put multiple find commands in the script. So your housekeeping collection
can grow over time as the need arises.

[Arturo Galbiati]

Hi,
simply add in your crontab the command:

cd && /usr/bin/rm *.txt

at more conveninet time for you.

HTH,
Art