Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello All


My Requirement is to Delete files in a particular directory based on its extension. So for that i have piece of Code down below

Code:

horo=`date +%Y%m%d`
logfile=/temp/log.file.$horo
date >> $logfile

for fulldir in 'ls -ld /temp/strs/*'
do
dir=`basename $fulldir`
case $dir in
        *he|*out|*bdy)
        echo $fulldir eligible to cleaning >> $logfile
        find $fulldir -type f -mtime +1 ! \( -name '.profile'-o -name '*history
' \) -ls -exec rm -f {} \; >> $logfile
        ;;
        *)
        echo $fulldir excluded from cleaning >> $logfile
        ;;
esac
done

So from Above you can see that i need to delete files with extension *.he,*.out and *.bdy from the directory /temp/strs. And i need to exclude everything else.

But while running the Script i am facing an Error

Usage: basename string [suffix]


Any Clue?

Regards
Ajesh

how about something more simple:

Code:

find /temp/strs -type f \( -iname "*.he" -or -iname "*.out" -or -iname "*.bdy" \) -exec rm -v {} \;

Since you have single quotes around the ls command, the for-loop only executes once and the value assigned to $fulldir is literally 'ls -ld /temp/strs/*'. Since the variable is unquoted, it will undergo field splitting. basename is then called with more arguments than it understands: (1) 'ls', (2) '-ld', (3...n) and all the filenames that matched /temp/strs/*.

If the ls command ran as intended, $fulldir would still give you problems because you're using a long listing (ls -l), which will insert into $fulldir dates, user ids, group ids, permission strings, dates, times, etc.

You do not need ls for this. It is an inferior solution to the shell's pattern expansion mechanism. In my code below, note that the trailing backslash of /temp/strs/*/ ensures that only directories are listed, and the line with the continue handles the special case of /temp/strs/*/ not matching anything and so expanding to itself, a non-existent directory.

Further, why are you even using basename at all? You don't seem to use "$dir" for anything but the case statement's pattern match. Since you're matching against the last component of the directory's name, the case pattern match will give identical results whether you're using the full pathname or the basename.

Code:

for fulldir in /temp/strs/*/
do
[ -d "$fulldir ] || continue
case $fulldir in
    *he|*out|*bdy)

You may want to give your logging a look over as well. You log the removal of a file before attempting the removal, but if rm fails, your log will not contain a record of that failure. You could redirect the find command's standard error to the same logfile so that rm will inherit it? Or, if not, place the -exec before the -ls, so that if the rm fails the file won't be listed as removed in the log. You can then log the find/rm error using the script's stderr. Just a thought.

Regards,
Alister

Brilliant. It worked.

I understand your comment about logging but wouldnt it complicate it further? I might give it a try when i have too much time.