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Full Discussion: UNIX Script to clean files
Top Forums UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers UNIX Script to clean files Post 303033053 by bakunin on Friday 29th of March 2019 07:12:03 AM
Old 03-29-2019
First off, welcome to the forum as well as the family of the most powerful OSes there is in the world. You will find that Unix - any Unix, including Linux - is a set of finely tuned tools, just like an orchestra is a set of highly trained musicians. Let the right conductor - you - step up and they will blow the audience away.

Quote:
Originally Posted by wert468
I need a script that would delete files which are more than "X" number of days old
Let us start right here, at your premise. In UNIX every file has not one but several timestamps. There is:

- creation time
- modification time
- access time

and they are all set independently. You open a text editor and write a new file. All three of these times are set. After some time you open the file in a text editor again and change something - only the modification time and the access time (because to change it you need to read it first) is changed. Some time after this you display the files contents - only the access time is updated.

Also notice that many files on a UNIX system are important or even vital even if they are NOT updated regularly. I.e. the configuration file for a web server is being read when the web server starts, so its access time may be 2 months past if it runs for 2 months. You still shouldn't delete it, though, if you want to be able to start the webserver again. (notice that UNIX systems running for months or even years is - unlike Windows systems - rather normal. I have actually customers complain to me if i want to restart their server once a year after some major OS update. "You restarted already last year, why now again?" - no, i do NOT exaggerate here, i heard, word for word, exactly this complaint. In the OS i work with the most - AIX, IBMs UNIX - it is even possible to do OS and kernel updates under load with no interruption of the service. For exactly these situations where customers complain about the necessity reboot once a year or every other year.)

On the other hand, UNIX systems do not have "drives" but only one (uniform treelike) filesystem. So you may identify one or several branches in this tree where you want to start the cleaning operation and leave alone all the others.

In light of this you might want to rethink and restate your goals and we can discuss what might be done then.

I hope this helps.

bakunin
 

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

arbitron

ARBITRON(8)						      System Manager's Manual						       ARBITRON(8)

 *

NAME

       arbitron - arbitron mailboxes

SYNOPSIS

       arbitron [ -C config-file ] [ -o ] [ -u ] [ -l ] [ -p months ]
		[ -d days | -D mmddyyyy[:mmddyyyy] ] mailbox...

DESCRIPTION

       Arbitron  collects  and	reports readership statistics for mailboxes on the server.  It also optionally prunes the mailboxes of Seen state
       for dormant users.

       Arbitron produces one line of output per mailbox, reporting the mailbox name followed by a space, followed by the number of readers (and if
       -u  is specified, followed by a colon and a comma-separated list of the readers userids), and if -o is not specified, another space and the
       number of subscribers (and if -u is specified, followed by a colon and a comma-separated list of the subscribers userids).  IMPORTANT: This
       format is subject to change in future versions.

       Each  "reader"  is  a distinct authentication identity which has "s" rights to the mailbox and which has SELECTed the mailbox within either
       the past days days or the specified date range.	Users are not counted as reading their own personal mailboxes.	Personal mailboxes are not
       reported unless there is at least one reader other than the mailboxes owner.

       Arbitron reads its configuration options out of the imapd.conf(5) file unless specified otherwise by -C.

OPTIONS

       -C config-file
	      Read configuration options from config-file.

       -o     "old way" -- do not report subscribers.

       -u     Report userids in addition to the count(s).

       -l     Enable long reporting (comma delimited table consisting of mbox, userid, r/s, start time, end time).

       -d days
	      Count as a reader an authentication identity which has SELECTed the mailbox within days days.  Default is 30.

       -D mmddyyyy[:mmddyyyy]
	      Count  as  a  reader  an	authentication	identity  which  has SELECTed the mailbox within the given date range.	The start date and
	      optional end date are specified as 2-digit month of the year, 2-digit day of the month, and 4-digit year.  If the end  date  is  not
	      specified, then the current system time is used as the end time.

       -p months
	      Prune Seen state for users who have not SELECTed the mailbox within months months.  Default is infinity.

FILES

       /etc/imapd.conf

CMU
								   Project Cyrus						       ARBITRON(8)
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