UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I must confess i have a very basic knowledge of UNIX and its commands, but i was hoping someone would be able to help answer my query.

Once a month as part of a team we have to perform housekeeping on our UNIX directories, we remove certain files older than 30 days and compress the reamining files.

I have searched this forum and found the following command

find /your_directory -mtime +7 -exec rm -f {} \;

i assume i replace the + with +30 to get my number of days but i would like to specify the file to remove.

E.G myfilename_varyingrunnumber.lis in folder myfolder and delete the file if it is older than 30 days.

I thought that maybe i could write a script with all the files that i need to remove e.g

myfilename_varyingrunnumber.lis --unix code to remove
myfilenametest_varyingrunnumber.lis --unix code to remove
....
.....

Is this possible? Please can someone help because it would save me alot of time and also mistakes with the rm command if it was automated!

Many Thanks

A loop reading from a list would be smarter than 8194706197 lines of
delete_file a
delete_file b
delete_file c
...

Will it need to remove the exact same files every time? If not, it'd be better to use 'find' than an enormous list of every possible file...

Hi,

Thankyou for your speedy reply,

Yes we remove the same files every month for example

hac001_runnumber.lis
hft987_runnumber.lis
.....

but the run numbers change each time

we then compress the remaining files.

What I would do is have a list of files, maybye keep it in /etc/purge, formatted like this:

Code:

hac???_runnumber.lis

Then use a script like this:

Code:

#!/bin/sh

while read FILENAME
do
    rm -f /path/to/${FILENAME}
done < /etc/purge

This will not work if there is an enormous number of files, however.