Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi Monks!
I have this sub routine running to delete files older then 7 days, but I think that this line " if ($now-(stat $file)[9]  > $age) { # file older than 7 days" is not getting the numbers right, even if I just create a new file it still gets seeing, can someone see what I can't!
sub del_old{

 my $age = 60*60*24*7;  # convert 7 days into seconds
 my $now = time();       # get current time
 
 # Delete files older than 7 days.
 opendir (DIR, "old") or die "Couldn't open directory, $!";

   while (my $file = readdir DIR) {
     next if $file=~/^\./;
     if ($now-(stat $file)[9]  > $age) { # file older than 7 days
       print "This $file wil be deleted\n";
     }

   }

 closedir DIR;

}

[download]

Thanks for looking!

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Delete old files
by Corion (Patriarch) on Mar 17, 2014 at 19:03 UTC

    The second paragraph of readdir deals with your problem. In short, you need to prepend "old" to $file. Also see File::Find and/or glob.

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      Looked at this and it still gives me any files in the directory: 
      ...
   my @file_list;
   while (my $file = readdir DIR) {
     next if $file=~/^\./;
     push @file_list, $file;
   }

 closedir DIR;

 for my $files (@file_list) {
  my @stats = stat($files);
  if ($now-$stats[9] > $age) { # files older than 7 days
    print "$files\n";
  }
}
...

      [download]
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[d/l]

        How did you change the construction of the entries in @file_list after reading the second paragraph of readdir?

        Also, why not use the following instead of the loop?

        my @file_list= glob("$old/*");

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Re: Delete old files
by Anonymous Monk on Mar 17, 2014 at 19:11 UTC
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