Shell Programming and Scripting

hi everyone,

I'm writing a script which collects different log files from different servers and generates log files in the format
name_YYYYMMDD_complete.log.Z
For example:
smp_20100825_complete.log.Z

these files are placed in a folder. I want to write commands such that the files older than 20 days gets deleted automatically once the script is run.

The script will run once in a day and generate a file for the last day. I have done this part. Now I have to enhance my script so that the files older than 20 days get deleted so that I can save some space in the HDD. For example if the script is run and the latest file generated is of date 20100825 then files 20 days older (means 20100805) gets deleted as well.

Kindly guide me as I have a little knowledge of scripting. Thanks

Add a find command to your script.

Code:

find . -mtime +20 -exec rm {} \;

This assumes that the files are in the current directory (.), or a subdirectory to the current directory. It will execute the rm command for each file that is older than 20 days. You could (should) run it like this first to be sure that it's selecting only the files you want:

Code:

find . -time +20 -ls

When doing time based searches with find (-mtime, -ctime, -atime) find uses the timestamp on the file in comparison with the current time, rather than using a midnight to midnight day. Thus, it can seem that find doesn't take action on a file that appears to be old enough, but is probably a few hours shy of meeting the time criteria.

You can also make the command more specific as far as deleting only files with certain file name patterns. Check the man page for find looking for the -name option to see how to do this.

If you need delete old log file by date in filename, and you have GNU date:

Code:

date=$(date -d "20 days ago" +%Y%m%d)
FolderA=/XXX/XXX

cd $FolderA

ls *complete.log.Z |awk -v d=$date -F \_  ' $2<d'    |xargs rm