UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I have backups of my db server performed on 2 differents disks (2 crontab entries).
Every day I have to look for the latest backup file on one of both disks.

In Digital VMS we had the concept of "Directory Search List", a kind of virtual folder containing a list of folders.
Is there such a kind of solution in Unix ?

Or may by should I create a partition of these 2 disks and have a look at the partition itself ?

Thanks for any help.

Zion

assume /path1 is the mountpoint for disk1, /path2 is the mountpoint for disk2

Code:

find /path1 /path2  -mtime -1 -name 'backup*' -exec ls -l {} \;

The find [path] [path] works as a search path. You can have an arbitrary number of paths.
Change the names and -mtime settings to match your needs.

What Operating System and version are you running?
What filesystem type hold the files (e.g.ufs, vxfs, LVM, zfs ...)?
What Shell do you use?
What backup software are you using?
What do you normally do to "look for the latest backup file on one of both disks"?
What do you do with the information when you find it?
How much do you want to automate, and what should the automation do?


We're not sure how much experience you have of unix. There are many unix tools to help locate files. There may be features of you backup software.

thanks Jim,
It works almots fine ;
find /backupMWS1 /backupMWS2 -mtime -1 -name 'ems.cmp.*' -exec ls -tc {} \;
produces:
/backupMWS1/ems.cmp.Feb01_07
/backupMWS1/ems.cmp.Feb01_11
/backupMWS1/ems.cmp.Feb01_15
/backupMWS1/ems.cmp.Feb01_19
/backupMWS1/ems.cmp.Jan31_19
/backupMWS2/ems.cmp.Feb01_09
/backupMWS2/ems.cmp.Feb01_13
/backupMWS2/ems.cmp.Feb01_17
/backupMWS2/ems.cmp.Feb01_21
/backupMWS2/ems.cmp.Jan31_21

As you can see (format name is MMMDD_HH) the files are primary sorted by folder name and then by date, if I add a |tail -1 I'm not sure to get the latest.

@Methyl :
We are using solaris 9 and ksh, about the file format i dont know, I assume it is the standart format. Backups are performed by embeded sql dumps operation in shells scripts.
dumps of main server are done every 2 hours on 2 differents disks and I must insert a crontab entry at 6AM to get the latest dumpfile and load it on a test server. This is a cheap replication procedure for developpers.

Because there are no space characters in the filenames and there are not too many files we can use "ls" to sort the files by timestamp:

Code:

ls -1ctr $(find /backupMWS1 /backupMWS2 -mtime -1 -name 'ems.cmp.*' -print)

Personally I'd not use the "-c" switch to "ls" because that timestamp is not always the timestamp of file creation. It is the timestamp of the last change of the inode.

I think you need to be very specific with your question so that you can get the best answers.