First off, welcome to the forum as well as the family of the most powerful OSes there is in the world. You will find that Unix - any Unix, including Linux - is a set of finely tuned tools, just like an orchestra is a set of highly trained musicians. Let the right conductor - you - step up and they will blow the audience away.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
wert468
I need a script that would delete files which are more than "X" number of days old
Let us start right here, at your premise. In UNIX every file has not one but several timestamps. There is:
- creation time
- modification time
- access time
and they are all set independently. You open a text editor and write a new file. All three of these times are set. After some time you open the file in a text editor again and change something - only the modification time and the access time (because to change it you need to read it first) is changed. Some time after this you display the files contents - only the access time is updated.
Also notice that many files on a UNIX system are important or even vital even if they are NOT updated regularly. I.e. the configuration file for a web server is being read when the web server starts, so its access time may be 2 months past if it runs for 2 months. You still shouldn't delete it, though, if you want to be able to start the webserver again. (notice that UNIX systems running for months or even years is - unlike Windows systems - rather normal. I have actually customers complain to me if i want to restart their server once a year after some major OS update. "You restarted already last year, why now again?" - no, i do NOT exaggerate here, i heard, word for word, exactly this complaint. In the OS i work with the most - AIX, IBMs UNIX - it is even possible to do OS
and kernel updates under load with no interruption of the service. For exactly these situations where customers complain about the necessity reboot once a year or every other year.)
On the other hand, UNIX systems do not have "drives" but only one (uniform treelike) filesystem. So you may identify one or several branches in this tree where you want to start the cleaning operation and leave alone all the others.
In light of this you might want to rethink and restate your goals and we can discuss what might be done then.
I hope this helps.
bakunin