Powerfull Find

[AZayed]

Dears,

Good day,

I have an issue with find command I would like to find files older than 2 days and move them to specific location. The issue is I want to build the exact same tree in the destination directory.

For example, I want to search /var/LOGS and move anything older than two days to /backup/var/LOGS. If there was a sub directories in the source I want to create it in the destination.

Regards,

[Jeeshan]

Salam Ahmed

try this command

#find /var/LOGS -type f -mtime +7 -exec mv -r {} /backup/var/LOGS \;

[Jeeshan]

mistake

#find /var/LOGS -type f -mtime +2 -exec mv -r {} /backup/var/LOGS \;

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

# cd /var
# find ./LOGS -depth -mtime +2 -print | cpio -pudlvm /backup/var

...will *copy* and replicate the directory/file structure in the destination directory. You will then need to remove what you don't want from the source tree in a separate pass.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Dennis Handly]

This solution does it in one pass but you'll need to write a customized script:

Starting from Ahsan's basic find:
find /var/LOGS -type f -mtime +2 -exec fancy_script {} +

Then create fancy_script:
#!/usr/bin/ksh
# Move files to /backup, keeping directory paths
for file in $*; do
mkdir -p /backup/$(dirname $file)
mv $file /backup/$file
done

[AZayed]

Thanks for reply,

Dear ahsan, mv doesn't have -r option it's only in cp.

Dears Dennis Handly and James R. Ferguson, I have this idea already, creating a script and calling it from find command. the script will use cp -r -p $1 $2 to create the specific tree. but I want to use mv command. This solution is very good but I prefer mv.

FANCY SCRIPT :

cp -r -p $1 $2
rm $1


FIND COMMAND :

find /var/LOGS -type f -mtime +2 -exec FANCY_SCRIPT {} /backup/var/LOGS-DATE \;

Any suggestion.

Regards,

[OFC_EDM]

Thought I'd throw my hat in the ring with another idea.

Step 1. Copy the entire directory structure to the new location. Including the files you don't want.
"cp -r" or "cp -p -r" to preserve permisssions

Step 2. Nuke the files from the new structure which you don't want.

I'd test this out first by replacing rm with ls -l just to make certain....I don't have a system to test this on today and this is from memory.

Example:
Find files in current directory only older than June 3rd 2008

1. Create reference file
touch -t 200806030000 /tmp/june3.ref
Format of the numeric is YYYYMMDDHHMM
- use some logic in the script to calculate proper value to represent 2 days agos. I like this because you can control it down to the minute.

2 Run the command
find ./loc/A/* ! -type d ! -newer /tmp/june3.ref -exec rm {} \;

If you like it then stick this in a script to automate.

I'll try to find my script which has all the little things like calculating the date etc for the touch command. But it'll be a few days.

Cheers

[OFC_EDM]

I'll add one more option.

The previous example I put in goes into sub-directories.

However if at some point you only want to process the current directory stick in the -prune argument

find ./loc/A/* -prune ! -type d ! -newer /tmp/june3.ref -exec rm {} \;

Regards

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

A word of caution.

All it takes is about 4 finds starting out at root to totally bring even a powerful system to its knees.

Use carefully, preferably one at a time.

Very interesting thread.

SEP

[Dennis Handly]

>I have this idea already, creating a script and calling it from find command. The script will use cp -r -p $1 $2 to create the specific tree. but I want to use mv command.

My script already does mv(1). What's wrong with it? It will only create the needed parts of the tree.

>find /var/LOGS -type f -mtime +2 -exec FANCY_SCRIPT {} /backup/var/LOGS-DATE \;

If you are changing the path in your target, then you'll need to fiddle with my script a little:
find /var/LOGS -type f -mtime +2 -exec FANCY_SCRIPT /backup/var/LOGS-DATE {} +

FANCY_SCRIPT:
#!/usr/bin/ksh
TARGET=$1
shift
for file in $*; do
mkdir -p $TARGET/$(dirname $file)
mv $file $TARGET/$file
done