UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I wanted to delete all the files under a directory "/apps/tmp/" which are two weeks older. But i should not delete the sub-directories and the contents of sub-directories.

I also have searched in forum and found the following command,

can some one explain me the meaning of this statement. And also is this the correct way to find the files under a directory excluding the search in sub-directories? can someone please guide me on this.

The above statement displays the sub-directories. I dont want to display the sub-directory names.

Please help me on this.

Thanks in advance.

Try:

Code:

find . \( ! -name . \) -prune -o -mtime +13 -print

There are plenty examples in the web and you can also just try it out without deleting/removing them while trying out.

The above should work - means
- look into . (your working directory)
- if there is something, that's name is not ".", prune it
- or check if it's older than 13 days on it's modification time and print it

If you are sure you get printed what you are looking for, you can add a "-exec rm {} \;" at the end for example.

Try This,
find . -maxdepth 1 -name \*.log -mtime +13 -exec rm "{}" ;

This wil find the *.log files and delete files older than 13 days, to avoid searching the subdirectories use maxdepth option.

Regards
Bala

Hi,
Thanks for your quick reply
1) when i execute the command,

find . -maxdepth 1 -name \*.log -mtime +13 -exec rm "{}" ;

I am getting the syntax error,

find: bad option -maxdepth
find: path-list predicate-list

I am using SUN OS 5.8 version

2) find . \( ! -name . -prune \) -mtime +13 -print

If i modify the above command to
find "/apps/tmp" \( ! -name "/apps/tmp" -prune \) -mtime +13 -print

Nothing is getting displayed. That is if i mention the full path instead of dot(cur dir) then nothing is getting displayed. I dont know what i am doing wrong here.
I am writing a script to search for files in a particular dir which is older than two weeks and then i have to delete those files which meets this condition. But i should not delete the sub dir's and the contents of sub-dir's.
I am very new to UNIX. Please help me on this.

Thanks in advance.

Other options:

[for find without the maxdepth option]

Code:

find /apps/tmp/. \( -name . -o -prune \) \
  -type f -mtime +13 -exec rm {} +

You may need to modify the code for some old versions of find that do not support the above syntax:

Code:

find /apps/tmp/. \( -name . -o -prune \) \
  -type f -mtime +13 | xargs rm

Note: the above will break if the filenames contain spaces, embedded new lines or other pathological characters and you should switch to the inefficient -exec rm {} \; or modify the IFS.

If you are lucky (i.e. you have zsh):

(. is for regular files, you may need to add some modifiers if you want to delete links and sockets too)

Code:

rm -- /apps/tmp/*(.Nmw+2)

With Perl:

Code:

perl -e'unlink grep { -f and -M > 13 } glob("/apps/tmp/*")'

You should modify the glob to include the dot-files.

Hi radoulov,

Thanks for your help.

Since i have lot of files under the directory, i have modified the command like the below,

dbalog=/apps/tmp
if [ -d "$dbalog" ]
then
find $dbalog/* -prune -type f -name "*" -mtime +13 -print | while read FILENAME
do
echo "Deleting file $FILENAME "
rm "$FILENAME"
done
else
echo "dbalog incorrect or missing: $dbalog"
fi

This was working fine. Can you please tell me is there any difference between the command,

Code:

rm "$FILENAME"

and 

rm -- $FILENAME

I know that if we have special characters in the file name then we have to specify the filename in double quotes or have to use -- before the file name. But what is the difference between these two commands. I dont find any difference while executing the command . Please help me on this.

Thanks in advance.

A -- denotes the end of flags that the command can take accept. What follows after that would be arguments to be operated upon. See the following sets of commands and notice that -- is needed to mark the beginning of file names.

Code:

[/tmp]$ mkdir "-f"
mkdir: invalid option -- f
Try `mkdir --help' for more information.
[/tmp]$ mkdir -f
mkdir: invalid option -- f
Try `mkdir --help' for more information.
[/tmp]$ mkdir -- -f
[/tmp]$ ls -l 
drwxr-xr-x  2 xxx xxx 4096 Oct 29 01:00 -f

[/tmp]$ rm -f
[/tmp]$ rm "-f"
[/tmp]$ rm '-f'
[/tmp]$ rm -fd -f
[/tmp]$ ls -l 
drwxr-xr-x  2 xxx xxx 4096 Oct 29 01:00 -f

[/tmp]$ rm -rd -- -f
rm: remove directory `-f'? y
[/tmp]$ ls -l -- -f
ls: -f: No such file or directory