UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

We have a number of OS X 10.6 machines who have home folders with incorrect permissions, which are causing managed prefs not to be applied correctly and not allowing saving. I need to delete all home folders whose name is numerical and modified before a certain date. I'm not sure of the date part but here is what I have as a command to be run over ARD:

ls /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Users | grep '[0-9]' | xargs rm -r

This works up until after the second pipe but doesn't actually remove the folder, just returns me to a command prompt (I'm testing on another machine in Terminal). I'd also like to add the find command after the grep command to narrow it down to folders modified before a certain date (unless grep can do mod dates, haven't had any luck finding that). Any help or suggestions for a n00b?

Take a look at the find command's manual page. find can match a file's name against a pattern, check the file's last access/modification/change time against a specified value, and it can also execute a command (rm in this case) with matching file names.

find(1) alone can do the job. You don't need to use grep or xargs or any other tool for the situation you described.

And, remember, when trying to delete a non-empty directory, you may need to pass to rm the -f option (or, depending on a file's permissions, you may be repeatedly prompted for confirmation).

Regards, good luck, and welcome to the forum,
Alister

That's what I get for too much thinking. Simplified it down to a single find command and worked like charm. Thanks!!

find /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Users/ -nouser -delete