I have a project that I am working on for work. I have never used BASH before, but I have to use it for this particular project. What I need to do is to look in a specific directory and then remove all of the files that are older than 5 days old. The file names consist of this: MDC__2004127_012_01.pos, so what I need to do is to cut this file name and get the date, then compare that to the current date and then remove it if it is older than five days from the current date. So, here is what I have so far:

# !/usr/bin/bash
#
# This script remotely deletes .pos files older than 5 days from $see_data_pvat
#

# setup variables
#

set olddir=$cwd
set td=`date -u +%Y%j`
set prevday5=`csh -f $see_batch/get_prev_yyyydoy.csh $td 5`

set thisdir=/home/tethys/kellym/projects/bash/temp_pos
cd $thisdir

set temp=`ls *.pos`

for file in ${temp}
do

So, I don't have very much right now. I am stuck at the part where I need to cut the file name to just get the date out of the file. How do you do this? Do you use cut? Any suggestions how to finish this project? Thanks a lot in advance!!!

Matt

find will do that in one line
Make sure you understand what you're doing before you clobber 1000 files by accident.

Can you just tell me what all of the options are in this line.
find /somedirectory -name \* -mtime -5 -exec rm -f {} \
What is -name, -mtime, -exec, and -f? Thanks

Here is the error that I get when I enter the following command:
Command:
find /home/tethys/kellym/projects/bash/temp_pos -name *'.pos' \* -mtime -5 -exec rm -f {} \
Error:
find: bad option MDC__2004127_012_01.pos
find: path-list predicate-list

How do I fix this?

*'.pos'

Why have you put in the ' ' marks around pos?
find /home/tethys/kellym/projects/bash/temp_pos -name \*.pos -mtime -5 -exec rm -f {} \;

would be the command, surely (and you missed the ; off the end)