Shell Programming and Scripting

I need to list and delete all files in current older which are olderthan 7 days. But my file names have white spaces. Before deleting I want to list all the files, so that I can verify.

Code:

find . -type f -mtime +7 | xargs ls -l {}

But the ls command is the working on the files which have white spaces.

Any other ideas ?

The solution is simple: stop using xargs.
If you want a long listing of files that find finds that meet your criteria, try:

Code:

find . -type f -mtime +7 -exec ls -l {} +

and if you want to get a long format listing of the files and also remove them, try:

Code:

find . -type f -mtime +7 -exec ls -l {} \; -exec rm {} \;

If you had a file named a b that hasn't been modified for more than 7 days, the command you used would try to give you a long format listing for files named a and b instead of the file named a b.

Thank you.
Just for understanding, what does " + "do in the command

The command:

Code:

find -type f -exec utility initial_arguments... {} +

in the specific case using -exec ls -l {} + invokes the ls utility with the -l option and operands specifying the names of one or more files (but limited to a number of operands that will not cause the invocation to fail due to an argument list too long error).

Using a semicolon instead of a plus sign to terminate the -exec primary will invoke the ls utility for each file instead of grouping a number of files together as operands to a single invocation of ls. (And, the semicolon has to be escaped or quoted, because it has special meaning to the shell.)

Probably in your case -mtime +7 is sufficient.
But it would have problems with files that are extracted from a tar or zip archive, getting a time stamp from the past (or the future).
In this case -ctime +7 is an improvement.
But a regular file backup (or virus scan) can reset atime (for convenience), and ctime changes.
The following is robust with archives and weekly full backups: \( -mtime +7 -o -mtime -0 \) -ctime +5, and run daily.

I want to remove the files with the pattern *.__* but need to eliminate the files which contains "ABC" and "XYZ". SO framed a syntax like below. Will this work ?

Code:

find . -name "*.__*" -mtime +60 -exec ls -lrt {} + | grep -iv "ABC" | grep -iv "XYZ" ; -exec rm {} \;

---
AIX 7.1

Code:

find . -name "*.__*" -mtime +60 ! -name "*[Aa][Bb][Cc]*" ! -name "*[Xx][Yy][Zz]*" -exec rm {} \;