Hi Folks,
Please help me with this scripting issue.

We've asked and asked the users to archive their old files in their home directory. They don't do it.

I need a script that will find any non hidden files that have not been accessed in 60 days or more, and write them to an existing large LUN (SATA disks) archiving file system.

I'd like to have the script create a directory on the archive file system which matches each users home directory the first time an old file is to be moved from the home directory. That way, when a user asks to have a file restored to his home directory, I know where to look for it.

Later, if files in the archive haven't been access for 90 more days, we'll move them to tape using NetBackup.

Thanks!

What have you got so far? You'll need the find cmd for the time matching (try mtime). You would start by listing the dirs under /home and for each one, check if there is an existing dir on the target server. Personally, I'd just enforce creating one for every user (permanently), even if he has nothing to backup. Simplifies the code and sooner or later he'll have a file to backup.

Finding and weeding out the files is no problem. The difficulty I'm having is creating directories and writing the files to the archive filesystem.
Here's what I have so far:
find /home/ -mtime +60 > /tmp/FilesMoreThan60DaysOld.txt
egrep -v ".kde|.zshrc|.emacs|.bash|.zshrc|.gtkrc" /tmp/FilesMoreThan60DaysOld.txt > /tmp/FilesMoreThan60DaysOld1.txt

This gives me a nice list of files targeted to be moved. Now, how do I create the directory structure necessary to move the files? Or would it be easier to just do a loop?

BTW, my shell scripting SUCKS!

foreach FILE in /tmp/FilesMoreThan60DaysOld1.txt
mv $FILE /archive
end

Something like that. As I've mentioned, my scripting leaves a lot to be desired.

Any help is really appreciated.

You're close! Investigate the -exec command in find perhaps?

One (simplistic) way would be

find /home -type f -mtime +60 -exec tar -rf /tmp/oldfiles.tar {} \; -exec rm -f {} \;

To break that down:
find /home -type f
#Find only files (not directories) in /home
-mtime +60
#the files must be 60 days or older
-exec tar -rf /tmp/oldfiles.tar {} \;
#append the found file to /tmp/oldfiles.tar, creating the tar file if necessary
#NOTE, you can't use in-line compressions here (j and z flags)
-exec rm -f {} \;
#remove the found file

Okay, I think I understand what you're doing...

However, the output of the find command needs to be edited via grep for hidden files that shouldn't be removed like:
.bashrc
.bash_profile
etc.

How can I feed the output of the grep command into the tar command? Everytime I try, it fails.

Hey, I said it was simplistic

But I think what you want is to go more complex...

Allright, lets try this: you can chain rules in find, and inside each rule, you can run execs!

Lets start with this:
(Note, this only works if you give it the full path, because I'm too tired to craft a more clever first-expression here)

find /home/ \( -type d -name ".*" -prune \) -o \( -type f ! -name ".*" \)

find /home
#List things in home

\( -type d -name ".*" -prune \)
#Prune (don't look in) directories that start with "."

-o
#or

\( -type f ! -name ".*" \)
#look only at files that don't start with "."


Now, if that made sense... we add two execs
find /home/ \( -type d -name ".*" -prune \) -o \( -type f ! -name ".*" -exec tar -rvf /path/to/my/archive.tar {} \; rm -f {} \; \)

To break that last expression down:
-type f
#Look at files
! -name ".*"
#not starting with "."
-exec tar -rvf /path/to/my/archive.tar {} \;
#append the files to the tar file /path/to/my/archive.tar
rm -f {} \;
#remove the file


The exec _only_ works on the files, not the directories since it's enclosed in the parenthesis \(\), so there may be empty directories laying around afterwards.

Does that help at all?



PS: Thanks for asking the question, it forced me to remember some find kung-foo I hadn't done in years!

For the love of god run this part a few times before you run the part with the rm!!

Good luck