quick script to houseclean old files

[James Barry Donovan]

Good Morning,

Their was a question that arose. We are beginning on a new Unix venture and our application developer needs to write a script to control old files. He needs to check the age of a group of files, if the age exceeds a certain # of days then perform a remove. How could we accomplish this.

Thanks!

-barry donovan
pfpc global fund services

[Joseph C. Denman]

James,

Delete dat files that have not been modified for 7 days.


find /the/dir -type f -name *.dat -mtime +7 -exec rm {} \;

man find

...jcd...

[Sebastian Galeski_1]

Hi
I am not sure if it resolve your problem but try to use next command (lets say we are interested in file located in folder /folder)

#find /folder -atime +30 -exec rm {} \;

it finds all files older than 30 days in /folder and erase it.

hope it help

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Hi:

Try something like this.

DIR=/home/mydir

find ${DIR} -type f -mtime +10 -name '*.dat' -exec rm {} \;

That will find all regular files (-type f) older than 10 days (-mtime +10) that end with '.dat' (-name '*.dat') and then call rm on that file.

Man find for details and make sure that you do something like -exec echo {} \; as a test before you substitute the rm command in the real thing.

Regards, Clay

[Helen French]

Hi,

Use the 'find' command with '-mtime' option.

For eg:

# find /test -xdev -type f -mtime +10 -exec rm {} \;

This will delete the files which are not modified within last 10 days from /test.

HTH,
Shiju