UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hi All

Can u tell me how to delete files (on unix)which is
exactly one month old or for that matter of a
particular date.

Hi,

I think u should find the files using find with an option of +mtime ( or +atime ) and use rm command on its output.

Check the man pages of find and this is available with examples.

is there any speed difference between the two ? also do both rcp or ftp use the same type of protocol ??

There is no speed difference - the difference is in the 'time' of the file. -atime will give the files accessed n days ago while -ctime gives you files in which the status was changed n days ago.

Experiment with the files you are looking at -
% find ./ -name "*" -atime 20 -ls
or % find ./ -name "*" -ctime 20 -ls

Once you get the numbers and files correct in your list, then
use something like the following
find ./ -name "*" -atime 30 -exec rm {} \;
(it is very important you get the last part correct since unknown errors could occur ) Also realize if you are dealing with removing a month's worth of files, this does it by days, you want to be careful of short months (such as this month).

Maybe its just me, but this looks a lot like a homework question.


If this is homework, please do a "man" on the find command. Or get a copy of the "Unix in a Nutshell" by O'Reilly.

do:

find . /a/b/c/log -name \*.log -mtime +10 | xargs rm

use mtime which is time last modified. if you use atime it means accessed. if someone looks at the file every day it will
never be deleted.

| xargs is more efficient because it does the action once on all files found vs. exec()ing an rm for each file.

you need to quote the * with ' or \ because the shell will expand the star to mean all files in . when in " type quotes.

Also take a look at the program below as a solution:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

@list2delete = `find /a/b/c/log -name \*.log -mtime +20 `;

$total = @list2delete;
if ($total !=0)
{
  foreach $i (@list2delete)
  {
    chomp $i;
    print "DELETING: $i\n";
    unlink $i;
  }
  print "$total files were removed\n";
}
else
{
  print "No Files to delete\n";
}

added code tags for readability --oombera