Shell Programming and Scripting

Good afternoon everyone,

For security reasons, I need to delete files on a HDD I have to send after the ending of a demo.
I need to find all the files which not end by ".log" and which have been created for 45 days.
After getting the file list, I would like to use the shred command.

It would be like this :

Code:

$ find / -regex '^.*(!(\.log))$' -ctime 45 | xargs shred -fuvz

But this command line does not work.

Any help would be relevant,
Thanks a lot.

Christophe

There is no way in Unix to get a files creation time. You can find a files modification time, mtime, (you have ctime - the time when a files status was changed - check out the find man page), and if you can guarantee the file has not been modified since it was created, you have your creation time.

Anyway, the -regex looks to be an overcomplication.

find / ! -name "*.log" -mtime 45 | xargs shred -fuvz

If this doesn't work, chances are the files would have been modified after creation.

EDIT; if running this as root, and some important system files were modified 45 days ago, you are staring into the eyes of doom with a command like that.

Do a
find / ! -name "*.log" -mtime 45 -print
to see the output before adding the "destructive" pipe through to xargs shred.

Cheers
ZB

I think it's actually worse than you think, ZB. Since the OP used the the past perfect tense, I would read that as:
... -mtime +44 ... # (I could not bring myself to type such a dangerous command in its entirety)

Destroy all files older than 45 days except for log files and a few newer files.

I can believe an attempt to destroy all files, but trying to leave stuff behind is weird. In any event shredding /dev/mem or /dev/kmem will panic the system for sure. But I doubt the command will get that far. We need some clarification here.