find and delete not working

[Paul Sperry]

Iam doing a massive oracle import and want to get rid of the archive logs every five minutes. My cron entry looks like the following:

00,05,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/bin/find /u05/archlogs -type f -name *.ARC -exec /usr/bin/rm -f {} \;

But it dosen't appear to be working.
The files in /u05/archlogs look like archT0001S00000123436.ARC

hp-ux 11.11

Not sure what Iam missing

TIA

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Your problem is -name *.ARC which should be expressed as -name "*.ARC" or -name '*.ARC'. You want find rather than the shell to expand the metacharacter so you must protect the target string with quotes.

[Paul Sperry]

silly me cron wasn't running

[Geoff Wild]

Clay is right - this is one I have:

find /usr/sap/SID/D*/data -name "SP*" -mtime +3 -exec rm {} \; >/dev/null 2>&1


Rgds...Geoff

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

On another note, if you want a less-intensive (faster) process, change:

# ... -exec /usr/bin/rm -f {} \;

to:

# -exec /usr/bin/rm -f {} \+

This bundles up filenames to spawn many less processes. A corollary implementation would be:

# ... | xargs rm -f {}

Regards!

...JRF...

[Paul Sperry]

thanks for verifing Geoff.

And thanks for the info James

[Paul Sperry]

Some how my thanks to Clay dissapeared.
Must have been when I reopened to assign more points.

Thanks again Clay