Deleting Files

mantra2006 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Deleting Files by Joost (Canon) on Oct 07, 2006 at 15:33 UTC
not perl, but.. assuming that by "30 days older" you mean files that have had their content last changed 30+ days ago: `find . -mtime +30 -exec rm -v '{}' \; >logfile.txt` [download] Be careful where you run that. updated: added quotes "What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Deleting Files by mickeyn (Priest) on Oct 07, 2006 at 17:04 UTC
find2perl ... will allow you to do more perlish manipulations inside the find loop. Enjoy, Mickey	[reply]
Re: Deleting Files by davido (Cardinal) on Oct 07, 2006 at 15:41 UTC
If "one liner" wasn't a 100% necessary criteria, you could do it very easily with File::Find. In your callback subroutine, do a -f test and a -M test to see if the file in question matches your criteria for deletion (note, that's a modification time, not a creation time). Then use unlink to do the deed. Be sure to open a logfile, and within your callback function print to the logfile to log the action. Dave	[reply]
Re: Deleting Files by marto (Cardinal) on Oct 07, 2006 at 15:24 UTC
You could have used Super Search before posting, questions like this get asked every so often. Check out Deleting by Age! and read How do I post a question effectively?. A little effort goes a long way, especially if you are "running out of time with server" Update: Node slightly updated. Hope this helps. Martin	[reply]
Re: Deleting Files by RobPayne (Chaplain) on Oct 07, 2006 at 19:17 UTC
Joost and the others have already provided working examples of tools which do what you have asked. The caveat with this operation is to be careful enough to not get bitten by the same types of bugs that have bitten others in this case. (You need to make sure that you adequately escape special characters in file names, quoting spaces, etc. so you don't, for example, call rm on a file named "/server/dir /etc/passwd" with that space in the name. You didn't mention what platform you were running on, but you might want to take a look at utilities that have already solved this problem and have already learned some of the lessons associated with this operation. One such utility is 'tmpwatch', which is included with redhat-based linux distros. Tmpwatch uses -atime instead of -mtime as the basis for how old a file is and whether it is ready to be deleted. That way you don't remove files that haven't been written to, which are still being read by current processes.	[reply]