Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello,

How would I write a BASH script to remove all sub directories in a root level directory that are older than
10 days, but exclude directories owned by certain users. I would need to run as a cron job once a week.

Thank you
-John

What code do you have now?
An overview of the steps:

Code:

cd to the directory
use find to locate directories with mtime > 10 days, rm -r the sub directory

One caveat - if you have multiple directory levels you may want to rethink your design. BY this I mean,

Code:

dira
   dirb
     dirx
   dirc
     dirm
     dirn

if you clobber dirc because it has not been written to, and dirn is still being modified you have a problem.

Code:

find /path/to/directory -type d ! \( -user user1 -o -user user2 \) ! -ctime -10 -print

find : find command to recursively locate files, links and directories.

/path/to/directory: location where to start searching from.

-type d: return true if is a directory.

! \( -user user1 -o -user user2 \): returns true if it DOES NOT belong to user1 or user2.

! -ctime -10: returns true if is NOT less than 10 days old.

-print: display the result. It is the default and can be omitted. But here is a place holder for following explanation.

If you like what you get, change the -print for -exec rm -rf {} + which, recursively, will delete those directories that matched.

There is an implied AND between all these expressions, which means: if is a directory AND if it doesn't belong to user1 or user2 AND if is not younger than 10 day.
If you want to exclude more users just add a -o -user <username> inside the ! \( \) The ! -ctime -10 can be changed to -ctime +10 as well