UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello. Newbie here....

I basically have a directory with tens of thousands (literally) subdirectories and need to delete those that are older than 2008 (hundreds) with all their contents. I've looked through all the RM parameters and still can't quite figure out how to specify the data range and then pipe it to a directory remove command. COuld some kind soul please help?

MTIA!!!!

Suppose you want to find flat files from 2008. First, touch a pair of files, mark2008 to "2008-01-01 00:00:00" and to "2009-01-01 00:00:00", and then

Code:

 
find ... -type f -newer mark2008 ! -newer mark2009 |xargs -n999 rm -f

I suppose for complete accuracy, the time stamps should be 1 second less, like mark2007/8end to "2007/8-12-31-23:59:59"!

Please be cautious of DGPickett solution because it does not match your requirement.
However because it does not delete directories it is less harmful than if it did delete them.

If the old directories are to be deleted, that is usually more manual, and easier if there is a date component in some directory name. As you say, removing directories that are just old is perilous. For instance, configuration or software installed and found satisfactory for a long time are now in old directories. If this gets to be a pain, manually, you might want to consider your design from a file and directory life cycle point of view.

I agree with DGPickett.
It is remarkably difficult to write a cleanup script which makes decisions based on a directory timestamp. This is because deleting files or subdirectories changes the directory timestamp. Also it is common to have a subdirectory with a timestamp newer than the parent directory.

In good old MULTICS, there were no hard links, just soft, but because of that, any mod. timestamp rippled up the tree to the root, so you could date the whole subtree under any directory. Backups were very easy. That is one of the tradeoffs with the inode / UNIX file system. In UNIX, a file can be in many directories, so none 'owns' it.

Off topic. DEC RSX11/M had the same concept.