Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello Guys ,

I am trying to run below find command in one of my SH script on a HP UX machine.

find /tmp -type f -name "MGCA*.log" -prune -exec rm -f {} \; 2>&1

I want this to check my tmp directory and delete MGCA log files .But below error message is printed on Promt :-

find: cannot open /tmp/veaintf
find: cannot open /tmp/ilmt

i removed this by directing stderror to /dev/null and it works fine.

find /tmp -type f -name "MGCA*.log" -prune -exec rm -f {} \; 2>/dev/null

My question here is :- To stop my command to look into other directories in tmp folder , i have used "prune" option. But it's not working fine for me.
Is there something wrong with my query.


Looking for your help on this.

Thanks,
Himanshu Sood

The description of the -prune primary is:

Code:

The primary shall always evaluate as true; it shall cause find not to descend the
current pathname if it is a directory. If the −depth primary is specified, the −prune
primary shall have no effect.

Since you've used -type f before you get to the -prune, you know that the current pathname cannot be a directory.

To do what you seem to be trying to do using -prune, you could try:

Code:

find /tmp ! -name /tmp -prune -type f -name "MGCA*.log" -exec rm -f {} \;

but it seems like it would be much easier just to use:

Code:

cd /tmp
rm -f MGCA*.log

unless there are so many matching files that this would exceed ARG_MAX limits on your system.

Don u rocks... Grt explanation .. This really helps .