How to write this script?

cghcgh · 05-06-2008, 03:34 AM

Hi,

I was given a task to do some housekeeping of users directory
Basically, the structure is of below.

/User DIR
---UserA
---UserB
---UserC
---UserD
---UserE

Each user contain several type of files.

I wan to do a housekeep of the directories to remove *.txt, *.log, *.wk1 that are more than 5 days old.

Pls kindly assist.

Randux · 05-06-2008, 03:55 AM

Are you gonna pay us too?

matthewg42 · 05-06-2008, 04:10 AM

The commands you will need are find, xargs and rm. This exact combination has been discussed many times before in this forum. Have a look at this thread to get a very good idea of what you need to do:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ght=find+xargs

jlinkels · 05-06-2008, 06:15 AM

Just one advice.

At the start of your script, put:

Code:

CMD=echo

Once you have tested and debugged your code, change this to:

Code:

CMD=/bin/rm

In your script use $CMD instead of rm.

You will be debugging with echo statements, after all is tested you replace echo with rm. Otherwise you might wipe out your hard disk when you forget a decimal point or so in your code. Been there, done that.

jlinkels

cghcgh · 05-06-2008, 09:39 PM

hi guys,
i did look at the link before.

i need to search for several type of extension .wk1 , .log , .txt etc. how do i incorporate it in? . Another thing is
ls -l | find . -name "*.txt" -mtime +3 -exec ls {} \; it actually returns me all the subdirectories as well. y is that so?

in my office, i have existing scripts that have similiar syntax
find . ! -type d -ctime -5 -name '*.txt' -exec ls {} \;
find . ! -type d -ctime -5 -name '*.txt' -exec rm -f {} \;

what does find . ! -type d means?

Pls kindly assist.

chrism01 · 05-06-2008, 11:19 PM

Read this page: http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/cmd/cmd.csp?path=f/find

matthewg42 · 05-07-2008, 03:22 AM

You can combine terms with OR and AND logical operators. The find syntax is "-o" and "-a" respectively. For example:

Code:

find . -name '*.txt' -o '*.xls'

Which will match files whose name matches the pattern *.txt OR the pattern *.xls - i.e. it will list them both.

You can also create more complex conditions using ( and ) to group statements. You can also use ! for logical NOT. These operators need to be escaped with a \ to prevent the shell from interpreting them. For example the condition "files whose name does not contain 'eight', and whose name matches *.jpg or *.txt" might be represented with the pseudo code:

Code:

(NOT NAME '*eight*') AND (NAME '*.jpg' OR NAME '*.txt')

...and this would be done with find like this:

Code:

$ ls 
eight.jpg  five.doc  four.dat  nine.jpg  one.txt  seven.jpg  six.jpg  three.xls  two.txt
$ find . \! -name '*eight*' -a \( -name '*.jpg' -o -name '*.txt' \)
./seven.jpg
./two.txt
./one.txt
./nine.jpg
./six.jpg

cghcgh · 05-08-2008, 12:32 AM

hi matthew, i finally make out the command..
KEEP=5

find . ! -type d -mtime +${KEEP} -a $ -name '*.log' -o -name '*.xls' -o -name '*.txt' -o -name '*.wk1'
$ -exec ls {} \;

i guess this should be correct. but the issue is that it will traverse down the subdirectories as well...i just want to limit to the current directory. how do i do that?

another question is...i have a ! ...what does it mean in the statement?

matthewg42 · 05-08-2008, 03:48 AM

Don't forget to escape the "!" character - many shells use this character to refer to previous commands, and can do weird stuff if you don't escape it with a preceding "\" character.

The -maxdepth option takes an integer argument which says how many levels of sub-directory to descend. 1 means just the specified directory (i.e. do not look in sub-directories. It matters where you put the -maxdepth option - it should go directly after the ".".

Code:

KEEP=5
find . -maxdepth 1 \! -type d -mtime +${KEEP} -a \( -name '*.log' -o -name '*.xls' -o -name '*.txt' -o -name '*.wk1' \) -exec ls {} \;

cghcgh · 05-28-2008, 04:36 AM

hi guys..thanks very much for the help. i managed to resolve this issue.