UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I want to find all files in a particular directory that are over 45 days old and belong to the user that ran the script

so, setting $userid to the output of `whoami` I used this command:

find . -mtime +45 -user $userid -print | xargs rm

Which works fine when it finds results. However, when I run it the second time it appears to ignore the userid and gives me only the files over 45 days old? What am I doing wrong here?

Thank you in advance...

When I ran a similar command with userid not defined, I received this message:

# find . -mtime +14 -user $userid -print | xargs ls
find: cannot find -print name

It then goes on to give me an listing of everything in the directory. I can get a similar result with

# cat /dev/null | xargs ls

So it appears that find is exiting on an error and closing its stdout. xarg then processess everything in the directory. I'd recommend replacing the xargs(1) pipeline with the find(1) "-exec" expression and quoting $userid. Also, it can't hurt to add a "-type f" expression to limit the search to files only.

find . -type f -mtime +45 -user "$userid" -print -exec rm {} \;

thank you!

That worked beautifully.