Trying to move files beyond cutoff date in subfolders and retain directory structure

Erik Mesoy · 03-15-2008, 05:14 PM

Hello,

my logs from various forms of chat (IRC, MSN, ICQ, various) are now beginning to grow excessively in size. I decided that I wanted to move all files older than 7 days to an external storage device, and figured after a while that I probably wanted to use ls with a sort-by-time order and pipe this to mv to move the files, however, I'm coming up against two problems. First, I don't see how to get any sort of "cutoff" in ls when I sort by time; Second, I want the moved files to retain their directory structure (it's sorted by program and then by server and then by user) when I move them. So it may be that I want to use mv directly in some way; I'm not sure.

My clunky fallback is to move the entire superfolder containing all the logs and let it re-establish itself over time - this will be annoying in the first few days, where I can't easily view what I was talking to a person about last time, but that's a minor nuisance, so this isn't a particularly important problem.

Thanks in advance for any help,

Erik Mesoy.

acid_kewpie · 03-15-2008, 05:28 PM

delete all files under /home/username which have last modified 30+ days ago...

Code:

find /home/username -mtime +30 -type f -exec rm {}\;

Erik Mesoy · 03-16-2008, 09:58 AM

Great! I read find's man page and figured out pretty much everything I wanted to do. (Some ugly hacks involved, but hey.

)

Thanks again,

Erik Mesoy.