I'm doing this using unxutils for windows btw.

I have a bunch of files that I would like to periodically purge after they are "x" days old. All of these files have <spaces> in the filename. I currently have a script that works to find multiple files and rm them, however it does not work when the filenames have spaces.

Any idea how I can get this to recognize spaces in the .log filenames

I don't know if this is available under unxutils, but you can try something like this
The -print0 option will print out filenames separated by a null-character and this should take care of the blank spaces. Then the output of find is piped to xargs with option -0 to accept input with null-characters. I intentionally leave an echo command to let you test before actually removing anything.

You need to put double quotes around the name pattern.
First use the find command by itself to make sure the correct logfiles are selected.

FYI: At work, I use cygwin/X in windows. It is handy having find, sort, sed, awk, etc. in windows.

This is not working, xargs is a command in unxutils. it goes all the way to -print0, prints the output, then when it tries to rm it says file not found for eveverything that has a space after it.

thanks for the replies

Try:

or

HTH

Forrest

This command doesn't work for any filenames.

??

What OS and distribution are you using?

edit:
ah windows ok..

This should be moved to non unix forum then

nx5000,

The command works for filenames that DO NOT have spaces in the name, but doesn't work if the file has a space in the name (as the text you quoted indicates). Also, I don't think that this will get ANY help from a non unix forum as not many Windows admins are familiar with find.

Forrest

Yes I realized it's not the original "find" I am using. Your initial command does not run on Linux.
From there, I can't help cause I don't have this tool, only cygwin on windows is the closest. Sorry..
Cygwin is quite useful, especially for find command

edit:
ok a guess

find "c:\logs" -name "*.log" -mtime +6 -exec rm "{}" ;

I'm using a package called unxutils for windows. It has all kinds of unix commands that will run on windows, I've been using it for quite some time now to do purges with find and -mtime and it has worked great, of course all of those filenames did not have spaces in them. Below is a list of all the exe's if you care

agrep.exe
ansi2knr.exe
basename.exe
bc.exe
bison.exe
bunzip2.exe
bzip2.exe
bzip2recover.exe
cat.exe
chgrp.exe
chmod.exe
chown.exe
cksum.exe
cmp.exe
comm.exe
compress.exe
cp.exe
csplit.exe
cut.exe
date.exe
dc.exe
dd.exe
df.exe
diff.exe
diff3.exe
dircolors.exe
dirname.exe
du.exe
echo.exe
egrep.exe
env.exe
expand.exe
expr.exe
factor.exe
fgrep.exe
find.exe
flex.exe
fmt.exe
fold.exe
fsplit.exe
gawk.exe
gclip.exe
gplay.exe
grep.exe
gsar.exe
gunzip.exe
gzip.exe
head.exe
id.exe
indent.exe
install.exe
join.exe
jwhois.exe
less.exe
lesskey.exe
libfl.a
libfl.lib
ln.exe
logname.exe
ls.exe
m4.exe
make.exe
makedepend.exe
makemsg.exe
man.exe
md5sum.exe
mkdir.exe
mkfifo.exe
mknod.exe
mv.exe
mvdir.exe
nl.exe
od.exe
paste.exe
patch.exe
pathchk.exe
pclip.exe
pr.exe
printenv.exe
printf.exe
pwd.exe
recode.exe
rm.exe
rman.exe
rmdir.exe
sdiff.exe
sed.exe
seq.exe
shar.exe
sleep.exe
sort.exe
split.exe
stego.exe
su.exe
sum.exe
sync.exe
tac.exe
tail.exe
tar.exe
tee.exe
test.exe
touch.exe
tr.exe
type.exe
uname.exe
unexpand.exe
uniq.exe
unrar.exe
unshar.exe
unzip.exe
uudecode.exe
uuencode.exe
wc.exe
wget.exe.vir
wget.hlp
which.exe
whoami.exe
xargs.exe
yes.exe
zcat.exe
zip.exe

nx5000: I had to use a different directory than "c:\logs" and escape the * in the original find command, other than that it worked fine in Linux.

200mg: Did you try my suggestions above? Either one should work.

Forrest

yes i tried them both, then tried rearranging the syntax still no good, thanks for the effort though

what do you mean by "escape the *"

On Linux I had to run the command like:

No, this shoudn't work! Because the character ; is used to separate commands so you have to escape (otherwise, it is not part of find parameters and find says error ";" missing)

find . -name \*.log -mtime +6 -exec rm "{}" \;

Which is equivalent to

find . -name "*.log" -mtime +6 -exec rm "{}" \;
find . -name \*.log -mtime +6 -exec rm \{\} ";"
find . -name \*.log -mtime +6 -exec rm \{\} \;

etc..

Do you have any documentation about this version of find?

Do this work:

I really appreciate everyone help with this. I'm heading down another road with this, I should have listened to the previous posts about cyg. I can get it to work through cygwin, now I have to figure out how to get a batch file to launch cyg and run this command..