command to clean up file systems


 
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# 1  
Old 04-04-2009
command to clean up file systems

As you will verify, I am a really naive user of AIX 5.1. As such I wonder if you could possibly let me know of a command or procedure I could use to automatically, globally and safely, remove all useless files from my machine. I'm not referring to my own files because I perfectly know which of them are useful. Instead I'm taking of directories and files in /tmp, /var/tmp and var/adm. Case in point: my /tmp contains a large number of empty subdirectories, the names of which are patterned as "aaa??????", "baa??????", etc.

If there is no global and safe removal command, would I damage the system if I remove all the contents of /tmp, /var/tmp directories by hand? And which could I safely remove from /var/adm?
By the way, where do all those "aaa.." and "baa.." directories come from?

Many thanks
# 2  
Old 04-06-2009
Honestly, we cannot know what's happening on your server, and which exactly application or user is creating those folders, named aaa or bbb. Looks like a test shell script pattern Smilie In any case, there's no global and safe remove command, you will need to go deeper, troubleshoot the system (owner, group, time stamp, last logins, who has root access, etc) and write your very own custom script to periodically clean this or that.
 
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