To delete a file if the sie of the file is less than 1 blocks in OpenVms

[John McL]

John G's question is very valid - why are these files being created? It may be a lot easier to prevent them being created than deleting them afterwards, and it will save the resources used when creating the file.

If you have no choice but to clean them up afterwards then maybe they have a naming convention that will help identify them. Use something like

$ WILD_FILE_NAME= "ABC*.*"
$ LOOP:
$ THIS_FILE = F$SEARCH(WILD_FILE_NAME)

This might avoid deleting the wrong file.

[Shriniketan Bhagwat]

Hi,

Who creates these files? Is it your application, when executed? If there is any specific pattern in the file name, then you can use the pattern to search the files using F$SERCH lexical as provided by the John Gillings. Be careful while deleting the files (you may not want to delete impotent files accidentally). As John Mcl said, it is good to prevent creation of such unwanted files than deleting then later. Prevention will save your precious time every time.

Regards,
Ketan

[CHANDRASEKARAN S]

Hi All,

Thanks for your comments.

[Zeni B. Schleter]

My two cents... If this is a one shot effort, taking the output of the directory listing mentioned and editing it to do the delete is fairly quick. If this is repetitive then you can also use the f$file_attribute lexical function to check on creation dates or modified dates as well as the size of the file.

I would still use the Open/Close check if unsure whether the file is in use or not.

[Paul Jerrom · Accepted solution]

What's the real problem? Loads of files in a directory? If they all have the same name and there are multiple versions being created and you are SURE you don't want to see the contents then you can set a file version limit - "$ SET FILE/VERSION_LIMIT=10 tmp.txt" will limit the number of occurances of tmp.txt to 10 (automatically deleting previous versions when needed). Although you'll have to purge the files down to the required number first ("$ PURGE/KEEP=10 tmp.txt").
But you'll need eventually to tackle the problem at source - find out what is creating the files and stop it!

[CHANDRASEKARAN S]

Hi all,

i have found out the issue why it was creating multiple files with 0 blocks. thanks a lot for your help. i have made the changes in the com.

Thanks to all once again.