ok i want to make a script that a cronjob will activate at 0600 hours every day (4 hours before a sutdown -h now saves the server from the major heat of the sun )
what i want it to do is ;
scan a specific folder and all the subfolders
move any folders and files that are over 45days old to a different hard drive (which is mounted as drive2 in my users folder)
it needs to preserve the filing structure (so for example say /data/bills/edf.pdf was 46days old it would move the folder to /drive2/data/bills/edf.pdf)
if it finds empty folders it needs to delete them
i then want it to scan the second hard drive for any files over 200 days old and delete them (thats a scary bit cos if i do that wrong all of my files go bye bye!)

im thinking this is possible but i have no idea where to even begin!

'find' allows you to use different timespecs: mtime, atime, ctime: see 'man find' to get the idea, practice a bit. 'cp' allows you to preserve filestructure as would a 'tar|untar' combo or cpio. A directory being empty means 'test' and with simple globbing you can use the exit code to determine to delete it or not. If all of this sounds a bit too much then you want some basic shell scripting docs like http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html and http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginne...tml/index.html and if you feel up to it maybe even start with the http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ ...

im thinking some sort of masters degree may be needed lol
will look into it all
i was thinking along the lines of;

find * timestamp>45days if so move /drive2/*

bugger

No, not at all. But if you make yourself *think* it's difficult before even trying then you'll make it harder.


Yes, almost there...