Help regarding a shell script

[Atul Gautam]

Hi Xperts,

I have got a dir structure in my home dir for FTP users which is ---

/home
|
/ftp
|
-------------USERS---------------
| | | | | |
A B C D E F |
|
|-/2006 - /Month - /Date - /1 & /2
| | |
| /a & /b /a & /b
|
|
|-/2007 - /Month - /Date - /1 & /2
| |
/a & /b /a & /b



The dir structure present under A is replicated under every user's home directory.

What I want is ---
FILES MODIFIED 7 OR MORE DAYS BACK SHOULD GET COPIED FROM "/home" TO "/archive" DIRECTORY USING THE SCRIPT.

The simple script that I could write is given below but it is not doing as to what I want
__________________________________________
DURATION=7
BACKUP=/tmp/ftp
HOME_DIR=/home/ftp

cp -rf -p `find $HOME_DIR -mtime +$DURATION | sed 's/\.\///' | sed '/.*\/.*/d'` $BACKUP
__________________________________________

It gets executed but gives me an error message at the end which is ---

./copy_file.sh: line 5: /bin/cp: Argument list too long


I also counted the no. of lines that it parses and it is 78916.

Kindly help me in resolving this problem.


Thanks in advance!!

ATUL

[Atul Gautam]

Hi Xperts,

I'm attaching a .doc file depicting the directory structure for your convenience.

Kindly help me.....


Thanks....



Atul

[g33k]

As far as I can read someoneelse script this will give you the list of file not modified for last 7 days.
Well it seems to be OK, but how many files could be used as source for cp command? I mean how long can be the list of coping files? I think it have limited count...

So try to use FOR cycle and coping one file from list after another.

I hope you know and use this but: http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

(nice "book" about scripting)

[Atul Gautam]

Hi...

As I know it will be....

List of file not modified in last 7 days but modified before that time.





--
Atul

[g33k]

As I allready said the argument list is too long cp is not able too handle such many parametres as sources. so solution is:

for File in `find $HOME_DIR -mtime +$DURATION | sed 's/\.\///' | sed '/.*\/.*/d'`; do cp $File $BACKUP; done

[Atul Gautam]

Thanks....

As you suggested...I also did the same thing but removed the "sed" portion from it....

Mine looks like dis.....

DURATION=7
BACKUP=/tmp/ftp
HOME_DIR=/home/ftp

for file in [ `find $HOME_DIR -mtime +$DURATION` ]
do
cp -rf -p $file $BACKUP
done



Thank u vereeeee much for your valuable help....



--
Atul

[g33k]

you are wellcome it was quite easy, when I was on the begining of my scripting way I've done a lot of mistakes... it wants just time and practice...

[Manuel Wolfshant]

you could also use two alternative methods

find $HOME_DIR -mtime +$DURATION` -exec cp -rf -p {} $BACKUP \;

or

find $HOME_DIR -mtime +$DURATION` | xargs cp -rf -p $BACKUP

[Atul Gautam]

Hi Manuel,

The command that you mentioned is not working as I want.

What I want is that "the files or directories that are being searched for should get copied in the same way as they are present.
In other other words I should say that the directory hierarchy should be maintained at the destination as well.

I appreciate your help. Your command did work, but it doesn't copy the files as per their hierarchy.




Thanks!!


ATUL

[Atul Gautam]

Hey Manuel,

I've attached a file with the output of few of my file names that I want to copy from the home directory location and wanna paste them inside /archive directory in the same hierarchy as they are present.




Atul