[SOLVED] in need help in creating a script to search and delete big & old mails

toshx · 10-07-2009, 06:52 AM

Iam a linux newbie administrator,administering a mail server my mail store is getting bigger every day, so we made a policy that evry day we should be deleting mails larger than 10mb and older than 90 days, i need help in creating a script that should automate this process,it should also log the files deleted. thanks in advance.

linuxlover.chaitanya · 10-07-2009, 07:33 AM

You can use the find command to find out the files you want to delete. You can combine the options as you want. Also it would be nice to show what you have done.

toshx · 10-07-2009, 07:47 AM

thanks for u reply

iam using this command find -size +10M -mtime +90 for searching then rm for deleting the files on by one.

catkin · 10-07-2009, 08:40 AM

Does that mean your question is answered, your problem solved? Or is there something more you want from us? If the first, please use "Thread tools" to mark the thread solved and if the second then please say what.

toshx · 10-07-2009, 09:22 AM

not yet solved ,now i need i need a command that should delete all the files at once not one by one,then i need to combine this into a script.

catkin · 10-07-2009, 09:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by toshx

not yet solved ,now i need i need a command that should delete all the files at once not one by one,then i need to combine this into a script.

What's the downside of a command that deletes them one-by-one? If you do create such a command (maybe find's xargs is what you are looking for) then copy and paste it into a file and make it executable -- there's your script. But you wanted to log the names of the files that are deleted; that's going to be a whole lot easier if you deal with the files one-by-one; then you can log that each file was deleted or deletion failed, including logging why deletion failed.

adm1329 · 10-07-2009, 09:59 AM

Ok I think this is what you want.

You want a script to do the search, delete the file and create a log of it. It might can be done a little simpler but I can make it work with a couple of commands and a script.

First you want to capture the output of your search into a file

Code:

find -size +10M -mtime +90 > files

Then you need a script to parse the file, delete, and log the files.

Code:

#!/bin/sh
while read files
 do
rm -f $files
echo " "$files" deleted "$(date +%Y$m$d)" " >> filelog
done

Then you need to execute the script telling it to parse the files file.

Code:

./filedel < files

You could create another script that would run just the two commands you need and set it up as a cron job to run daily.

Code:

#!/bin/sh
find -size +10M -mtime +90 > files
./filedel < files
done

Just don't forget to make your scripts executable

Code:

chmod +x scriptname

toshx · 10-07-2009, 02:02 PM

Thankz that has solved z problem

Tux-Slack · 10-07-2009, 02:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by adm1329

You could create another script that would run just the two commands you need and set it up as a cron job to run daily.

And put in a cron for automatic execution each day.