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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers use of xargs and prune piping with find command. Post 302281115 by rwuerth on Wednesday 28th of January 2009 08:29:26 AM
Old 01-28-2009
the -prune option prevents find from walking a subdirectory underneath it's current location. Without prune, you might print a listing as follows:

file1
file2
dir1
dir1/file1
dir1/file2
file3
file4

With prune you would print a listing like this:

file1
file2
dir1
file3
file4

When the command is piped into xargs followed by another command like the 'rm' in your example xargs acts as like a loop for the input coming from the pipe and runs the command (rm -f ) for each line of input.

The directory wont be removed by rm -f but the error will be sent to /dev/null so the user wont see this. The effect is that the files will be removed but not the directories, nor the files in the directories.
 

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crontab(5)							File Formats Manual							crontab(5)

Name
       crontab - clock daemon table file

Syntax
       /usr/lib/crontab

Description
       The  command  executes  at  specified dates and times according to the instructions in the file. The file consists of lines with six fields
       each.  The format for a line is as follows:

	      minute hour day month weekday command

       The following list defines each field in the line:

       minute (0-59)  The exact minute that the command sequence executes.

       hour (0-23)    The hour of the day that the command sequence executes.

       day (1-31)     The day of the month that the command sequence executes.

       month (1-12)   The month of the year that the command sequence executes.

       weekday (1-7)  The day of the week that the command sequence executes. Monday = 1, Tuesday = 2, and so forth.

       command	      The complete command sequence variable that is to be executed.  Note that the command string must conform  to  Bourne  shell
		      syntax.

       The first five integer fields may be specified as follows:

       o   A single number in the specified range

       o   Two numbers separated by a minus, meaning a range inclusive

       o   A list of numbers separated by commas, meaning any of the numbers

       o   An asterisk meaning all legal values

       The sixth field is a string that is executed by the shell at the specified times.  A percent sign (%) in this field is translated to a new-
       line character.	Only the first line of the command field, up to a percent sign (%) or end of line, is executed by the  shell.	The  other
       lines are made available to the command as standard input.

Examples
       The following example is part of a file:
       # periodic things
       0,15,30,45 * * * * (echo '^M' `date`; echo '') >/dev/console
       0,15,30,45 * * * * /usr/lib/atrun

       # daily stuff
       5 4 * * * sh /usr/adm/newsyslog
       15 4 * * * ( cd /usr/preserve; find . -mtime +7 -a -exec rm -f {} ; )
       20 4 * * * find /usr/msgs -mtime +21 -a ! -perm 444 -a ! -name bounds
	    -a -exec rm -f {} ;

       # NOTE: The above line is wrapped.

       # local cleanups
       30 4 * * * find /usr/spool/mqueue -type f -mtime +5 -name df-exec rm {} ;
       35 4 * * * find /usr/spool/mqueue -type f -mtime +5 -name tf-exec rm {} ;
       40 4 * * * find /usr/spool/rwho -type f -mtime +21 -exec rm {} ;
       #

       # redirecting error output
       0 17 * * 1,3,5 /bin/tar -cv /usr/sysads/smith > /dev/console 2>&1
       #

Files
See Also
       sh(1), cron(8)
       Guide to System Environment Setup

																	crontab(5)
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