Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello

We have to monitor a FTP utility where we have to monitor for checking presence of a file in directory With max time allowed for a file to stay in the directory on FTP client server as 10 mins.
The only way we are going to be able to do what we are lookign for is to write a script to determine whether or not there are any files in the specified directory that are > 10 minutes old and return a status of something like :"true" for files found or "false" for no files found. Have the script write/update that status to a log, say ftp-files-over-10-minutes.txt,

can you please share such a script

Thanks,
Viv

Hi,
I can see a few possibilities. But time-to-live will always be subject to how often You check. You can have a script running that constantly checks for files of a certain "age" and take action upon them, such as logging, deleting, etc. You will have to have a loop and the tighter (the shorter sleep You have) will put a higher load on the system. Or You can rely on a cron utility to schedule such a script to run every minute or so, and You may have to keep track of "previous time" and "current time" between runs, etc.

But if You have the option of installing extra software and Your kernel supports the inotify subsystem, You should definitely have a look into the inotify-tools or incron. Those tools will allow You to "put a watch" on file events, for example specific files or directories, and take action upon that event. That could for example be starting a script (with the file as an argument) log its creation, sleep for 10 minutes, delete it, log its deletion and then exit.
How does that sound?

Best regards,
Lakris