UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi All,

Problem Statement:Find all log files under all file systems older than 2 days and zip them. Find all zip files older than 3days and remove them. Also this has to be set under cron.

I have a concerns here

Code:

find . -mtime +2 -iname "*.log" -exec gzip {}

Not sure if this will work as the files will be having different permissions. Does it need to be configured at root level for it to perform the activity for all user files on the server

please help

I am tempted to say no, but I dont know your system... If someone unset read for all on such files and you do not belong to the specified group then it cannot be read... and so the answer would be you must be root...
Now who is the silly guy going to do such thing on log files? If you do so ( yes I do have to is some cases...) then you set also the group ownership for the people that can read the logs... and so you dont need to be root, only be member of the good group...

With remove:

Code:

find . -type f \( -mtime +3 -iname "*.log.gz" -exec echo rm -f {} \; -o -mtime +2 -iname "*.log" -exec echo gzip {} \; \)

Remove the echo if you think it works.
Without root rights it will need to read the existing files and write a new file in the current directory, and it will be owned by the creator. If it fails it will give stderr message and continue.

Thanks all,

I got it set at the root level. Works fine for me.
The situation was a little typical as this is a system where too many users log in and create log files and they all belong to different groups so coming down to one single group was a pain however that suggestion was helpful as it made me understand what I cannot do for sure in my current scenario.

Thanks a lot for the help guys.

If you have some older <something>.log.gz files lying around in these dirs, the FIND commmand will pass those to GZIP and GZIP will try to re-compress those again and ask for each and every one of the files if I want to overwrite the existing <something>.log.gz file.

I tried FIND using -regex with ".*\.log\b" boundary to exclude the existing *.log.gz files but it did not work. Not sure why.

Unfortunately GZIP also does not have a --exclude parameter.

Does someone have an idea how to do this using Find and GZIP?