log of deleted files

[John M_1]

Hi all,

I have a cron job script to delete output reports files from a directory older than 20 using the following command:
>>>
find . -mtime +1 -exec ll {} \;
find . -mtime +1 -exec rm {} \;
<<<
Is there a way that I can log all the files deleted in one single command rather than have two file sweeps.

Thanks very much in advance,
John

[Peter Kloetgen]

Hi John,

try the following command:

find . -mtime +1 -exec ls -A {} \; | tee log_file | xargs rm

Allways stay on the bright side of life!

Peter

[Ulf Lipski]

Hi,

just consider that using xargs is limited by the total count of the argument list. Therefore it doesn't work if there are too many files.

By, Ulf

[John M_1]

Thanks again to all,
how about this command:

find . -mtime +1 -exec ls -A {} \; |tee log_files | awk '{print "rm "$1}' |sh

I guess there will not be restrictions as Ulf pointed out

[Heiner E. Lennackers]

Hi,

the main use of xargs is to avoid having to much arguments to a command. with the xargs option -n you can specify how many argument you want to give to each execution of the specified command.

But another problem you will face with the xargs solution are blanks in a filename. i would use the following command:

find . -mtime +1 | tee -a /path/to/mylogfile | xargs -i rm "{}"

Heiner

[Systeemingenieurs Infoc]

if you're only interested in the filenames, you can do :

find . -mtime +1 -print -exec rm {} \;

[Darrell Allen]

Hi John,

For your example:
find . -mtime +1 -exec ll {} \; -exec rm {} \;

You may want to add the "-d" option to "ll" if you have sub-directories. Or you chould use "-type f" option for the find.

Darrell

[Eric Ladner]

There's nothing that says you can't have two exec's in the same find command.

find . -mtime -1 -exec ll {} \; -exec rm {} \;

Just make sure the rm is last or the ll won't work. They are executed in order.

This will retain your previuos behavior as well (i.e. output in the mail from cron, not some other log file)

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi John:

You can also use the '-t' (trace) option of 'xargs' to echo to stderr the command that will be executed, in this case thereby capturing a log of those files which are removed:

# find . -mtime +1 -type f xargs -L 500 -t -i rm {} 2> /tmp/removedfiles

I've added the '-L' option to 'xargs' to limit the number of arguments processed during each interation. This avoids the argument-too-long problem, particularly on 10.x releases.

Regards!

...JRF...

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi (again) John:

I'm sorry, I dropped a pipe. The command should read:

# find . -mtime +1 -type f | xargs -L 500 -t -i rm {} 2> /tmp/removedfiles

Regards!

...JRF...

[Martin Johnson]

find . -mtime +1 -exec rm {} \; -print

will work too. You can alway redirect the output to a file.

HTH
Marty

[harry d brown jr]

Of course, don't forget to EMAIL that list of deleted files:

uuencode /tmp/logfiles logfiles.txt | xmail -m -s "log of deleted files" yourname@your.com someonelsesname@your.com

live free or die
harry