find option for not-open files?

[Gordon Morrison_1]

Hi,
My pesky users keep filling up /tmp (there are far too many to re-educate!).
They have kindly said that I can delete any files older than 10 days, but there are always some files in there which are being held open by processes.
fuser returns success if it runs successfully regardless of whether the file is open or not, and I could see no mention of detecting open files on the find man page.
I want to script a cron job to delete files older than 10 days, but exclude open files.
Any ideas?

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

You could feed the output of your find to an lsof command specifying +D /tmp. You also need to get your users to quit using /tmp. /tmp is for the operating system's temp files; users should be using /var/tmp.

[Victor BERRIDGE]

Hi,
I suppose you will need lsof to see which files are opened by processes...
Ge and dowload it from your favorite Archive porting center

Good luck

All the best
Victor

[Peter Godron]

Gordon,
congrats on the headgear!
The long term fix would be to set quotas on the users, which would stop them leaving files lying around.
It's difficult to spot individual open files unless you use lsof. You could try combining the find option for creation date > 10 days and modification time < 1 day, but this depends on how often the files get written to.
I'm sure somebody will have a perl script.

[Robert Bennett_3]

#!/usr/bin/sh
# remove files in /tmp not modified in 10 days
find /tmp -mtime +10 -type f -exec rm {} \;

[Procnus]

The command line I generally use is:
fuser 2>/dev/null | grep [0-9] >/dev/null

$? becomes the return code for the grep

Cheers
Steven

[Gordon Morrison_1]

Thanks for all your replies. My thoughts and/or test results for each are below:

Clay;
lsof looks like it will do the trick, thanks! Though I don't think I need the +D flag in this case (the man page was even harder to find than the binary!)
I know they shouldn't be doing it, but there are hundreds of them (clueless lusers, keyboard monkeys, cow-orkers, in-DUH-viduals, call 'em what you will) I'm outnumbered!

Victor; ditto on the lsof idea

Peter; (Aw, gee thanks!) Unfortunately, these users are all tippity-tappity-typing in LOADSAMONEY for The Company, so enforcing quotas is really not an option (never delete files, quota gets reached, can't create files, application hangs, money stops coming in, customers get P'd off, go elsewhere, "what happened?" "Well, Gordon set these quotas..." "Oh. I wish him luck in his next job.") Ditto for lsof, as these open files don't get written to for many days at a time and they belong to the main application for this box, that's why find -mtime doesn't cut it.

Robert; That's exactly the command I would normally use, but being paranoid, I ran it through fuser instead of rm, and found open files not written to for >10 days. Phew, that was close!

Steven; That looks good, and I really thought it would work, but as you can see from the output below, it returns inconsistent results and I have no idea why. It *should* have worked.

for file in *AH[DP]P
do
fuser $file
fuser $file 2>/dev/null | grep [0-9] >/dev/null
echo $?
done
B6161scrn.AHPP:

1
B6238scrn.AHPP:

1
CMD-R42054291832.AHPP:

1
REFUND_AHDP:

1
REFUND_AHPP:

1
bwdaemon.AHDP: 24746o

1
bwdaemon.AHPP: 24293o

1
clm_aud_07-FEB-05_AHDP:

1
clm_aud_07-FEB-05_AHPP:

1
clm_aud_08-FEB-05_AHDP:

1
clm_aud_08-FEB-05_AHPP:

1
clm_aud_09-FEB-05_AHDP:

1
clm_aud_09-FEB-05_AHPP:

1

etc. etc. etc.
blah blah blah...

clm_aud_20-FEB-05_AHDP:

1
clm_aud_20-FEB-05_AHPP:

1
clm_aud_21-FEB-05_AHDP:

1
clm_aud_21-FEB-05_AHPP:

1
pms_errAHDP:

1
pms_errAHPP:

1
qasdaemon.AHDP: 24741o 24747o

1
qasdaemon.AHPP: 10984o 11013o

0
strm_errAHDP:

1
strm_errAHPP:

1

========
Go figure :o/

Thanks again to all

[Gordon Morrison_1]

lsof is what I needed