Background: I am setting up a temporary directory on my network (linux samba svr) that will allow users to temorarily store files, facilitate put/get file exchanges between users, create test files/dir temorarily, etc. Users are only allowed to store files there for a very limited amount of time.

Objective: I would like to create a cronjob or script file that automatically deletes file 48 hours after they are copied to the folder (or delete files that are older than 48 hours).

Cron? Pearl Script?

Im a newbie - please help!

Thanks

I would use cron and find.

#!/bin/sh
find <startdir> -ctime 48 -exec rm -f {} \;

where <startdir> is the full path to the direcotry where the temp file is stored.
put the above in /etc/cron.hourly/remove_48.sh
You might want to change rm -f to ls -l to make sure it is going to remove the correct files first as a test.

excellent!!! Thank you so much for you help!

Hi, thanks for this script. I'm trying to apply it in my environment, which is Red Hat, but I'm getting the following error message:

fin: missing argument to '-exec'

I had to remove the #!/bin/sh for some reason, it was coming up as a bad interpreter. Unfortunately, I am a total novice on Linux, and I didn't set this environment up, so I don't know if there are some restrictions on what scripting language I can use or anything.

Can anyone offer any assistance?

Please show the exact script and check that the start dir you specified is correctly named; note that Linux is case sensitive(!) for cmds, files and parameters/switches ...

Thanks for the response, the script I used is:

find /Invoice -ctime 48 -exec rm -f {} \;