Help with old user cleanup

[Robert Butler_1]

Hello,

I am cleaning up old users off the HP-UX. I can do:
find / -name xxxx
and list the files that they have created or have ownership to. Is there a way to pipe this into a tar or similar command to create a single file with their old files before I run a find command to remove the files?

[Dan Hetzel · Accepted solution]

Hi Robert,

find / -user xxxx | xargs tar cvf /dev/rmt/0m
should do the trick.

Best regards,

Dan

[Rita C Workman]

How about this:

find / -name xxx -exec mv {} /newdir/dir/ \;

/rcw

[Dan Hetzel]

Hi again,

Forgot to mention that with the -user option, if the next argument isn't a login name, it will be taken as numeric.
This is useful if you remove files from users already deleted from /etc/passwd.

All the best,

Dan

[Andreas Voss]

Hi,

for this purpose i would recommend cpio:

find / -name xxxx | cpio -oc | gzip -c >userfiles.cpio.gz

I have used gzip to reduce disk usage.
To restore something you could use:

gzip -dc < userfiles.cpio.gz |cpio -imdvc

Regards

[Robert Butler_1]

Thank you all.

I think I'll go with Dan's approach and put to a tar file which I'll gzip up. Once all the old users files are created I can move them to tape.