Removing files dated in the future.

[John Jayaseelan]

Hi
Hope someone can help me here, I'd be very grateful!

We have some files, quite a lot I'd guess, that have a date & time stamp in the future. This is because the Unix date has been changed back & forth on the box for User Acceptance Testing. These files are now causing a problem & I've been asked to remove everything that is time stamped with a future date.
Can someone possibly give me an idea how best to go about it, we know the directories they will be in & I'm guessing that find, grep or awk may do the trick. however I'm not too sure of the right syntax.

Many thanks in anticipation
Sue

[Darrell Allen · Accepted solution]

Hi Sue,

Use find with the -newer option.

Touch a reference file, perhaps /tmp/reference. It will be created with the current date/time.
find /dir -newer /tmp/reference -exec rm {} \;

I'd use -exec ll -d {} \;
before I actually ran with the rm just to be safe.

Darrell

[Trond Haugen]

Create a reference file with touch with a sutable date and use find with the -newer option to find them.

#touch -t 03011212 XX #Just creating an example file to find later
#touch -t 02281212 ref
#find . -newer ref
./XX

Of course you could remove them with the find command:
#find . -newer ref -exec rm {} \;

Hope this helps,
Trond

[Peter Kloetgen]

Hi Sue,

you could use the find- command with -newer to solve your problem:

find /path_to_directory -newer /path_to_time_reference_file -exec rm {}\;

if the number of files is not to big or if you want to make sure not to delete wrong files, you could also use -ok instead of -exec. This would mean you have to answer a confirming question with "y" to remove the file.


Allways stay on the bright side of life!

Peter

[John Jayaseelan]

Wow Rapid response !! Thanks Guys ;-))

I'm actually away from my system today, & am just preparing for tomorrow, so I'll give your suggestions a try then & assign points after.

Many thanks once again
Sue

[John Jayaseelan]

Hi all who helped me out.

The job got pulled in the end, so I didn't have to do it. However I tried out your suggestions on a test box & they all worked perfectly. Great reference for later.
Points assigned
Thanks for all youe assistance.

Sue