UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi there,

I am trying to tar a number of files held in a specific folder. I am only interested in archiving files older than 30 days. Having read through the man entries and all available documentation I thought I'd cracked the coomand with

tar -c -z -v -N 15/04/2004 -f /wfch.tar *

This tar's up the whole of the pwd

Anyone know the correct syntax please ?

Best way I know is to use a reference file...

Touch a file and use that as the reference date...

# touch -t 03091301 testfile
root:/root/LVMcommands
# ll toddfile
-rw------- 1 root sys 0 Mar 9 13:01 testfile

tar -cvf test.tar `find . -type f -newer testfile`



Here is a link to my question waay back when... with answers... http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/f...hreadId=203693

Thanks for this. It really is appreciated

I've been working on it all day. I've checked out the link you provided as well. Every time I try running the command I end up with the folowing:

/export/home/dbadmin/dsoreceipts > ls -l t*
-rw-r--r-- 1 dbadmin academy 0 Jan 1 00:01 testfile
/export/home/dbadmin/dsoreceipts > tar -cvf test.tar 'find . -type f -newer testfile'
tar: find . -type f -newer testfile: No such file or directory

Am I missing something obvious here?

Should be back tics... not single quotes

` ` not ' '

Thanks again. I thought it was something obvious I'd missed.

I have ran this but it has tarred up all files younger than the reference file. I have tried changing the -newer switch to -after-date but this is classed as a bad option.

I've experimented with the following command and, although not as flexible as your suggestion it's a work around for the time been:

find . -mtime +30 | xargs tar -cvf mar_03.tar

This'll be the last time I ask Todd, but do you have an answer to your orignal reference-file command ?

hehe I misread your post... -newer is for more recent files... you wanted OLDER files...

You must use the +N value to do that I think... I thought you had asked about newer...


My bad.



one more note... You can use the -I option to list the full path to the filenames in a file to be backed up... If you can generate a list of the filesyou want to backup, use this option.

find . -mtime +30 > file.out ... then you can run the tar versus a known list of files that you can edit and remove or add filenames.

Thanks for the additional notes. I've got a file (archive_printlib) which contains a script that now works (example below):

touch -t 19040004 archive_printlib
find . -mtime +19 | xargs rm tick*
find . -mtime +19 | xargs rm hold*
find . -mtime +19 | xargs rm pass*
find . -mtime +19 | xargs rm mdlo*
find . -mtime +19 | xargs rm STAGE*
find . -mtime +19 | xargs rm WFPS*
find . -mtime +19 | xargs rm BMODCL*
find . -mtime +19 > arch.out | xargs tar -cvf mar_04_tar -I /apps/academy/live/hs/printlib/arch.out
compress mar_04.tar