topic Wana help in writing a script in Operating System - Linux

Wana help in writing a script

cse.ashish — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 06:34:42 GMT

Hi All,

I am looking for a command which can filter out all the files which have been created or modified 15 days or before from the today's date.
And I have to run this script/command on daily basis. So I want it to take current system date itself (I mean I want to make it generalize).
Can any buddy help me out in this.

Regards,
Ashish

Re: Wana help in writing a script

Pete Randall — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 06:49:30 GMT

You want to look at the find command. I think what you're saying is you want to exclude the files from the most recent 15 day period? This should do it:

find /start_dir -type f -mtime +15

That will give you a list of files created or modified prior to the last 15 days.

To exclude those:

find /start_dir -type f ! -mtime +15

The results of either of those can be piped to xargs to take some action on them. To remove the files older than 15 days:

find /start_dir -type f -mtime +15 |xargs rm

Pete

Re: Wana help in writing a script

James R. Ferguson — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 06:50:27 GMT

Hi:

First, Unix does not have a "creation" timestamp. There is a last-modified ('mtime') value that at the moment of creation represents the named time but thereafter the value is the last modification time.

# find /path -xdev -type f -mtime +15

See the manpages for 'find(1) and 'stat(2)' for more details.

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: Wana help in writing a script

Piergiacomo Perini — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 06:51:21 GMT

Hi Ashish,

maybe a command like this :

find / -type f -mtime +15 -print -exec ls {} \;

(that take file older than 15 days)
could be a good starting point for your script.

Hth
regards
pg

Re: Wana help in writing a script

spex — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 06:55:13 GMT

Hello,

I guess I'm interpreting Ashish's request differently...

Show files in /path with last modified time less than 15 days:

$ find /path -type f -mtime -15 -print

If you wish to perform an action on these files, 'find' has the '-exec ' primary. You could also pipe the output from 'find' to 'xargs', or to an external file, which you would then read in at a later point.

Note that there is no notion of a "creation date" for files under UNIX. However, as long as a file's timestamp hasn't changed since it was created, last modification time will function as a pseudo-creation time.

PCS

Re: Wana help in writing a script

cse.ashish — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 09:17:21 GMT

Thanks a lot to all. I'll try this and use the same in my script.

And yes, It was my mistake to write "creation time" in my question. May be because of too much of work :) I wrote that. But I meant actually with modified time only.

Thanks & Regards,
Ashish