The current find command is utilized to find and delete outdated files and directories. The expired data is based on a given properties file and the destination.
If the properties file says…
"/home/some/working/directory;.;180"
…then we want files and empty subdirectories deleted after 180 days.
The original command is…
"find ${var[0]} -mtime +${var[2]} -delete &"
…but I now need to modify now that we've discovered is has deleted symbolic links that existed in specified sub-directories after the given expiration date in the properties file. The variable path and variable expiration time are designated in the properties file (as previously demonstrated).
I have been testing using…
"find -L"
…to follow the symbolic links to make sure this clean up command reaches the destinations, as desired.
I have also been testing using…
"\! -type l"
…to ignore deleting symbolic links, so the command I've been trying is…
"find -L ${var[0]} ! -type l -mtime +${var[2]} -delete &"
…but I haven't achieved the desired results. Help please, I am still fresh into Linux and my research hasn't lead me to a desired answer. Thank you for your time.
Change
\! -type l
to
\! -xtype l
find -L ${var[0]} \\! -xtype l -mtime +${var[2]} -delete &
Related
find /home/root/public_html/_sess -type f -mtime +3 -name 'sess-*' -execdir rm -- {} \;
I feel like I understand find , but I'm not 100% sure what -type is, I think that is the file type f not sure yet -mtime I feel like -mtime means a time setting of some sort, and +3 means maybe that time setting +3? , I feel like -execdir rm -- just means remove the files in the directory call -name 'sess-*' as well. But again not 100% sure of all the command elements within and wanted to get clarification.
You can do man find to get information on how Linux find works and all the options you can pass to it.
In this case, the command is using the Linux find utility to search for files in the /home/root/public_html/_sess directory with the following options:
-file f - searches for files of filetype f, which is regular files (not directories, links, etc)
-mtime +3 - searches for files modified more than 3 days ago (the + is for more than, -3 would be less than 3 days old)
-name 'sess-* - searches for files whose name matches the regex sess-* (name starts with "sess-")
-execdir <command> {}; - executes <command> on each file that find finds in the directory that the file was found in, in this case <command> is rm to remove the file
So in summary, this job searches for files located in a certain directory, whose names start with a specific string, and which are more than 3 days old, and deletes them.
I'm trying to use find to find and exclude/filter few directories from being copied to another backup directory.
My attempts to do so using find's '-exec' option end up copying every processed file instead of only the matches, so I'm quite confused about what the expected behavior should be and would appreciate help gaining better understanding.
Starting point:
me#computer>ls
AddMonitorsOnEntry MantisCoreFormatting MantisGraph PastePicture XmlImportExport
Make sure find excludes the unwanted 'files' as expected
me#computer>find . -maxdepth 1 -not -regex '.*MantisCoreFormatting\|.*MantisGraph\|.*XmlImportExport'
.
./AddMonitorsOnEntry
./PastePicture
Now to copy those 2 directories to a backup dir:
me#computer>find . -maxdepth 1 -not -regex '.*MantisCoreFormatting\|.*MantisGraph\|.*XmlImportExport' -exec cp -dr '{}' ~/backup \;
Now to see if it worked...
me#computer>cd ~/backup
me#computer>ls
AddMonitorsOnEntry backup MantisCoreFormatting MantisGraph PastePicture XmlImportExport
WTH??
I thought '-exec' only operated on the matches, according to this snippet from the man page: " ...The specified command is run once for each matched file..."
I know there are other ways to accomplish this task, but '-exec' seems to work well enough for the poster here https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/50612/how-to-combine-2-name-conditions-in-find/50633. I'm looking for help understanding how to make use of "-exec" versus using xargs or something else. Thanks.
Now to copy those 2 directories to a backup dir
You don't have 2 matches. Your command shows 3:
.
./AddMonitorsOnEntry
./PastePicture
. is the current directory, so your cp command copies everything.
Instead of find . you can use find * to skip the current directory ., but still process all the (non-hidden) files/dirs within it.
Silly of me..
My initial find expression includes the current directory as a result, so any files in the current dir will be operated on by "-exec".
To fix I added the current dir among the ones excluded.
me#computer>find . -maxdepth 1 -not -regex '.*MantisCoreFormatting\|.*MantisGraph\|.*XmlImportExport\|\.'
./AddMonitorsOnEntry
./PastePicture
I am using the 'find' command to identify modified files. But I've noticed that my method only identifies content-modified files and new files. It does not identify files where the only change was a rename. Is there a way to use 'find' to identify renamed files? If not, is there some other linux command that can be used for this?
Here is my current method for identifying changed files going back roughly one month (this method does NOT identify renamed files):
$ touch --date "2017-09-10T16:00:00" ~/Desktop/tmp
$ find ~/Home -newer ~/Desktop/tmp -type f > modified-files
You should replace option -newer with \( -newer -o -cnewer \) in order to catch modifications to file metadata as well.
I have a directory named repository which has a number of files and sub directories. I want to find the files and directories which have not been modified since last 14 days so that I can delete those files and directories.
I have wrote this script but it is giving the directory name only
#!/bin/sh
M2_REPO=/var/lib/jenkins/.m2/repository
echo $M2_REPO
OLDFILES=/var/lib/jenkins/.m2/repository/deleted_artifacts.txt
AGE=14
find "${M2_REPO}" -name '*' -atime +${AGE} -exec dirname {} \; >> ${OLDFILES}
find /path/to/files* -mtime +5 -exec rm {} \;
Note that there are spaces between rm, {}, and \;
Explanation
The first argument is the path to the files. This can be a path, a directory, or a wildcard as in the example above. I would recommend using the full path, and make sure that you run the command without the exec rm to make sure you are getting the right results.
The second argument, -mtime, is used to specify the number of days old that the file is. If you enter +5, it will find files older than 5 days.
The third argument, -exec, allows you to pass in a command such as rm. The {} \; at the end is required to end the command.
This should work on Ubuntu, Suse, Redhat, or pretty much any version of linux.
You can give the find -delete flag to remove the files with it. Just be careful to put it in the end of the command so that the time filter is applied first.
You can first just list the files that the command finds:
find "${M2_REPO}" -depth -mtime +${AGE} -print
The -d flag makes the find do the search depth-first, which is implied by the -deletecommand.
If you like the results, change the print to delete:
find "${M2_REPO}" -mtime +${AGE} -delete
I know this is a very old question but FWIW I solved the problem in two steps, first find and delete files older than N days, then find and delete empty directories. I tried doing both in one step but the delete operation updates the modification time on the file's parent directory, and then the (empty) directory does not match the -mtime criteria any more! Here's the solution with shell variables:
age=14
dir="/tmp/dirty"
find "$dir" -mtime "+$age" -delete && find "$dir" -type d -empty -delete
In linux shell, When I run
ls -al -t
that show the time of files.
How to cp/rm files by time? just like copy all the files that created today or yesterday. Thanks a lot.
Depending on what you actually want to do, find provides -[acm]time options for finding files by accessed, created or modified dates, along with -newer and -min. You can combine them with -exec to copy, delete, or whatever you want to do. For example:
find -maxdepth 1 -mtime +1 -type f -exec cp '{}' backup \;
Will copy all the regular files in the current directory more than 1 day old to the directory backup (assuming the directory backup exists).
Simple Example
find /path/to/folder/ -mtime 1 -exec rm {} \; // Deletes all Files modified yesterday
For more examples google for bash find time or take a look here