Shell Programming and Scripting

I am trying to cleanup a directory with around 4000 files, and using the below command to delete all .gz files older than 60 days, I am having the same issue of arguments being too long. is there a way i can use the same command to do what I intend to do.

Code:

find /opt/et/logs/Archive/*.log.*.gz -type f -mtime +60 -exec rm {} \;

That's an inefficient usage of find. Instead of specifying so many paths, try:

Code:

find /opt/et/logs/Archive/ -type f -mtime +60 -name '*.log.*.gz' -exec rm {} \;

It would be more efficient to replace \; with +.

Hey Elixir,

This change worked for me . but can you explain what is the difference between using

Code:

\;

and

Code:

+

Thanks,
Shelly

With ; (escaped by \ so that the shell does not treat it as command separator), {} will be replaced by one pathname (file) at a time in your rm command. But, with +, pathnames will be grouped in sets and each set will be replaced in {} so that rm will operate on multiple files at a time.

Check man page for find under the -exec primary for more details.

EDIT: Hey, that's a thread hijack. I didn't notice this till now. Mods, please create a new thread if required.

moved to new thread...