Delete Old Spam Emails Custom Cron

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07-29-2008

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Delete Old Spam Emails Custom Cron

Hey Guys,

I've done some research however I got stuck. My goal is to create a cron job that runs every hour and goes through all web accounts on my server and deletes spam emails that are older than 3 days. This is what I came up with:

Code:

0 * * * * find /home/*/mail/*/*/.spam/cur/* -type f -mtime +3 -exec rm{}

HOWEVER

... when i test just a piece of that command:

Code:

find /home/*/mail/*/*/.spam/cur/* -type f -print |xargs ls|wc -l

I get the pretty "Argument list too long" error. I dont want to proceed setting up that cron job until I'm 100% sure that it is correct and will work on all user accouts with some of them having over 50,000 spam emails in ther .spam/cur folder. Any advice?

plxkarl

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LEARN ABOUT REDHAT

cron

CRON(8) 						      System Manager's Manual							   CRON(8)

NAME

       cron - daemon to execute scheduled commands (Vixie Cron)

SYNOPSIS

       cron

DESCRIPTION

       Cron should be started from /etc/rc or /etc/rc.local.  It will return immediately, so you don't need to start it with '&'.

       Cron searches /var/spool/cron for crontab files which are named after accounts in /etc/passwd; crontabs found are loaded into memory.  Cron
       also searches for /etc/crontab and the files in the /etc/cron.d/ directory, which are in a different format (see  crontab(5)).	Cron  then
       wakes up every minute, examining all stored crontabs, checking each command to see if it should be run in the current minute.  When execut-
       ing commands, any output is mailed to the owner of the crontab (or to the user named in the MAILTO environment variable in the crontab,	if
       such exists).

       Additionally,  cron checks each minute to see if its spool directory's modtime (or the modtime on /etc/crontab) has changed, and if it has,
       cron will then examine the modtime on all crontabs and reload those which have changed.	Thus cron need not be restarted whenever a crontab
       file is modified.  Note that the Crontab(1) command updates the modtime of the spool directory whenever it changes a crontab.

SEE ALSO

       crontab(1), crontab(5)

AUTHOR

       Paul Vixie <paul@vix.com>

4th Berkeley Distribution					 20 December 1993							   CRON(8)

UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers