I am trying to delete all files that are older than 7 days. The command is working but not correctly.
find '/files/tem_data/' -mtime +7 -exec rm -rf {} \+
It does delete files but it's not accurate.
ls -Artl | head -n 2
The find does delete files, but when I run the ls command does contain files that should be deleted. For example today is November 7th. The find should delete all files before November 1st. It does not. The command leaves files that are in October 30 and 31. How can I delete files that are older than 7 days.
If I run find command like 3 minutes later. It deletes files with the date of October 30 and a time of 3 minutes after it first ran.
From man find:
-atime n
File was last accessed n*24 hours ago. When find figures out how many
24-hour periods ago the file was last accessed, any fractional part is
ignored, so to match -atime +1, a file has to have been accessed at least
two days ago.
This means that your command actually deletes files that were accessed 8 or more days ago.
Since the time now is
$ date
Tue Nov 7 10:29:29 PST 2017
find will require files need to be older than:
$ date -d 'now - 8 days'
Mon Oct 30 11:29:05 PDT 2017
In other words, leaving some files from Oct 30 is expected and documented behavior.
To account for find rounding down, simply use -mtime +6 instead.
This is not the exact answer but you can try this as an sample.
find /path/to/ -type f -mtime +7 -name '*.gz' -execdir rm -- '{}' \;
Or for an alternative and also faster command is using exec's + terminator instead of \;:
find /path/to/ -type f -mtime +7 -name '*.gz' -execdir rm -- '{}' +
or
find /path/to/ -type f -mtime +7 -name '*.gz' -delete
find: the unix command for finding files/directories/links and etc.
/path/to/: the directory to start your search in.
-type f: only find files.
-name '*.gz': list files that ends with .gz.
-mtime +7: only consider the ones with modification time older than 7 days. -execdir ... \;: for each such result found, do the
following command in rm -- '{}': remove the file; the {} part is
where the find result gets substituted into from the previous part.
-- means end of command parameters avoid prompting error for those files starting with hyphen
.
Related
I'm using "ls -alR" to input directories and files in those directories into another text file.
ls -alR > testalR.txt
text file is created like so:
./test-file_folders/test_folder_1:
total 400
drwx------ 5 "user" "group" "size" May 2 10:30 test_file_1
.... file info ... more file info ....test_file_2
...more files
./test-file_folders/test_folder_2:
total 400
drwx------ 5 "user" "group" "size" Oct 2 11:35 test_file_1
.... file info ... more file info ....test_file_2
...more files
I am trying to show files that have not been accessed since October 2 2018.
I've tried:
`sed -n '/Oct 2 00:00/,/Oct/ 2 23:59/p' /testalR.txt
..but it produces no results. Is there a better way to display this or even possible?
Sorry, should have added this to begin with. I know using find -atime variant would be the best option. But we are using a system and a process that is bogged down by the find command. I am trying to find alternatives so using "find" can be avoided and wouldn't have to access directories directly each time I wanted to run a search.
Parsing the output of ls is a slippery slope.
Use find:
find . -type f -atime +3 -print
find . -type f -atime +3 -exec ls -uld {} +
Using -print simply returns a list of the filenames. Using -exec ls -ld {} + causes ls to be run for every file returned, giving you the details you may want.
The argument. to atime (or mtime or ctime) is in 24-hour steps. The argument can be positive or negative (or zero). Using -atime +3 finds a files that have been accessed at least FOUR days ago.
Using -exec ... {} + causes the command in "..." to be executed for every object returned, bundling as many objects (files) as possible at a time. This is much more efficient than forking a process for every file returned, as with:
... -exec ls -uld {} \;
One way to limit your results to a specific date, is to create two reference points (files) like this:
touch -amt 201809302359 f1
touch -amt 201810012359 f2
find . -type f \( -anewer f1 -a ! -anewer f2 \) -exec ls -uld -exec {} +
try with find:
find /folder -atime +30
where +30 = days
others params: man find
E.g., a MySQL server is running on my Ubuntu machine. Some data has been changed during the last 24 hours.
What (Linux) scripts can find the files that have been changed during the last 24 hours?
Please list the file names, file sizes, and modified time.
To find all files modified in the last 24 hours (last full day) in a particular specific directory and its sub-directories:
find /directory_path -mtime -1 -ls
Should be to your liking
The - before 1 is important - it means anything changed one day or less ago.
A + before 1 would instead mean anything changed at least one day ago, while having nothing before the 1 would have meant it was changed exacted one day ago, no more, no less.
Another, more humanist way, is to use -newermt option which understands human-readable time units.
Unlike -mtime option which requires the user to read find documentation to figure our what time units -mtime expects and then having the user to convert its time units into those, which is error-prone and plain user-unfriendly. -mtime was barely acceptable in 1980s, but in the 21st century -mtime has the convenience and safety of stone age tools.
Example uses of -newermt option with the same duration expressed in different human-friendly units:
find /<directory> -newermt "-24 hours" -ls
find /<directory> -newermt "1 day ago" -ls
find /<directory> -newermt "yesterday" -ls
You can do that with
find . -mtime 0
From man find:
[The] time since each file was last modified is divided by 24 hours and any remainder is discarded. That means that to
match -mtime 0, a file will have to have a modification in the past which is less than 24 hours ago.
On GNU-compatible systems (i.e. Linux):
find . -mtime 0 -printf '%T+\t%s\t%p\n' 2>/dev/null | sort -r | more
This will list files and directories that have been modified in the last 24 hours (-mtime 0). It will list them with the last modified time in a format that is both sortable and human-readable (%T+), followed by the file size (%s), followed by the full filename (%p), each separated by tabs (\t).
2>/dev/null throws away any stderr output, so that error messages don't muddy the waters; sort -r sorts the results by most recently modified first; and | more lists one page of results at a time.
For others who land here in the future (including myself), add a -name option to find specific file types, for instance: find /var -name "*.php" -mtime -1 -ls
This command worked for me
find . -mtime -1 -print
Find the files...
You can set type f = file
find /directory_path -type f -mtime -1 -exec ls -lh {} \;
👍
Good morning,
I have many files inside directories, subdirectories which I'm now using copy everything inside.
find /tmp/temp/ -name *files.csv -type f -exec cp -u {} /home/dir/Desktop/dir1/ \;
And I was wondering, if there is anyway that I can copy like, copy if the file's modified date is within two days. I don't want to copy if the modification date is 2 days before the current date.
You can use mtime within your find command:
find /tmp/temp/ -type f -mtime -2 -name *files.csv -exec cp -u {} /home/dir/Desktop/dir1/ \;
This would copy only files with a modified time within the last two days of the system time.
-mtime n
File's data was last modified n*24 hours ago
so I have looked at every single script on here regarding deleting directories older than 14 days. The Script I wrote works with files but for some reason it is not deleting the directories. So here is my scripts.
#!/bin/bash
find /TBD/* -mtim +1 | xargs rm -rf
So this code successfully deleted the FILES inside TBD but it left two directories. I checked the timestamp on them and they are atleast 2 days since last modification according to the timestamp. Specifically Dec 16 16:10 So I can't figure this out. My crontab I have running this runs every minute and logs and in the log it only shows.
+ /scripts/deletebackups.sh: :2:BASH_XTRACEFD=3xargs rm -rf
+ /scripts/deletebackups.sh: :2: BASH_XTRACEFD=3find /TBD/contents TBD/contents -mtime +1
I used contents since the contents are actually peoples name in our pxe server. I checked every file and folder INSIDE these two directories and their timestamps are the same as the parent directory as they should be but it's still not deleting.
Could it be a permissions thing? I wrote the script using sudo nano deletebackups.sh
When I type ls under TBD in the far left it shows
drwxr-xr-x 3 hscadministrator root 4096 DEC 16 16:10 for each of the two directories that won't delete.
I'm not overly familiar with what all those letters mean.
Other iterations of this code I have already attempted are
find /TBD/* -mtime +1 rm -r {} \;
To delete directories in /TBD older than 1 day:
find /TBD -mtime +1 -type d | xargs rm -f -r
Add -exec and -f to your find:
find /TBD/* -mtime +1 -exec rm -rf {} \;
Note, if you're looking to delete files older than 14 days, you need to change mtime:
-mtime +14
We have linux machine we would like to check what new files have been added between a certain date range.
I only have SSH access to this box and it's openSUSE 11.1
Is there some sort of command that can give me a list of files that have been added to the filesystem between say 04/05/2011 and 05/05/2011
Thanks
Regards
Gabriel
There are bunch of ways for doing that.
First one:
start_date=201105040000
end_date=201105042359
touch -t ${start_date} start
touch -t ${end_date} end
find /you/path -type f -name '*you*pattern*' -newer start ! -newer end -exec ls -s {} \;
Second one:
find files modified between 20 and 21 days ago:
find -ctime +20 -ctime -21
finds files modified between 2500 and 2800 minutes ago:
find -cmin +2500 -cmin -2800
And read this topic too.
Well, you could use find to get a list of all the files that were last-modified in a certain time window, but that isn't quite what you want. I don't think you can tell just from a file's metadata when it came into existence.
Edit: To list the files along with their modification dates, you can pipe the output of find through xargs to run ls -l on all the files, which will show the modification time.
find /somepath -type f ... -print0 | xargs -0 -- ls -l
I misunderstood your question. Depending on what filesystem you are using, it may or may not store creation time.
My understanding is that ext2/3/4 do not store creation time, but modified, changed (status, which is slightly different), and access times are.
Fat32 on the other hand does contain creation timestamps IIRC.
If you are using an ext filesystem, you have two options it seems:
1.Settle for finding all of the files that were modified between two dates (which will include created files, but also files that were just edited). You could do this using find.
2.Create a script/cronjob that will document the contents of your filesystem at some interval, e.g.
find / > filesystem.$(date +%s).log
and then run diffs to see what has been added. This, of course, would prevent you from looking backwards to time before you started making these logs.
You can try one of these:
find -newerct "1 Aug 2013" ! -newerct "1 Sep 2013" -ls
find . -mtime $(date +%s -d"Jan 1, 2013 23:59:59") -mtime $(date +%s -d"Jan 2, 2016 23:59:59")
find /media/WD/backup/osool/olddata/ -newermt 20120101T1200 -not -newermt 20130101T1400
find . -mtime +1 -mtime -3
find . -mtime +1 -mtime -3 > files_from_yesterday.txt 2>&1
find . -mtime +1 -mtime -3 -ls > files_from_yesterday.txt 2>&1
touch -t 200506011200 first
touch -t 200507121200 last
find / -newer first ! -newer last
#!/bin/bash
for i in `find Your_Mail_Dir/ -newermt "2011-01-01" ! -newermt "2011-12-31"`; do
mv $i /moved_emails_dir/
Hope this helps.