Comments on: Delete Files Older Than x Days on Linux

By: Philippe

Philippe — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:18:26 +0000

Please remove my post, I discovered faults in it!

By: Philippe

Philippe — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:09:15 +0000

Artem Russakovskii and others, is there an argument for find, so that directories will NOT be removed?

(From a NTFS slave-disc, I need to delete the 200 000 oldest and 50 000 newest files and only keep the directory tree and all files from a 20-day period. (Permission of NTFS files “cannot be decided”, so ownership is missing, which causes 250 000 questions “cannot move to trash, cancel/remove?” when I try using GNU desktop). (It is a “blue screen of death” disc of course…))

By: dennis

dennis — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:32:46 +0000

a lot of smart people here … =)

this tip and the comments help a lot.

By: spage

spage — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:55:59 +0000

Great tip. implemented this to clear stale mysql dumps.

Offer… What about scheduling a cron to touch the file daily, weekly, or whatever? this will keep the file from aging and thus keep it from being deleted by this command?

By: Artelius

Artelius — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 01:28:44 +0000

In response to Offer (re deleting files which are still open in some process)

Under UNIX, the filesystem is like a “map” you use to locate files. Sometimes there are two different paths to the same file (these are called “hard links” and can be created with the ln command).

When you “remove” a file, actually you are just removing one method of finding the file (this is why removing a file is sometimes called “unlinking”). When you remove ALL methods of finding a file, the file is really deleted and no longer takes up space.

In your case, there are two links to the file:
/tmp/dont_delete_me.txt
and
your program’s handle to this file

If you remove the first of these, the file will not be deleted – it will still “exist” but will ONLY be accessible to the program that has the file open. When this program closes the file, the file disappears completely.

Artelius

By: Offer

Offer — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 10:37:53 +0000

Hi all,

This is all great, but I still can’t figure something out…
lets say I want to clean /tmp every day.
Let us say file /tmp/dont_delete_me.txt is 7 days old. The process creating the file is still up and holding the file open. For this example let us say the process will write a single line every once in a while…
If I would try to delete the file, what will happen to the holding process? Is there a way to know if a file is in use/open?

I would like to clear a production server /tmp directory but never harm any running process…

Thanks,
Offer Baruch

By: Matt Wells

Matt Wells — Sat, 09 May 2009 07:25:09 +0000

I run a script that takes the client’s URL and puts it into a file called database on my shared cPanel hosting. I want to empty that file once a day. What is the command line that I would enter into the advanced cron editor? I am probably wront but would it be something like:

cp dev/null /home/username/public_html/directory/cgi-2009/database

Please let me know..

Thanks Much,

Matt W.

By: Sir Hoagy

Sir Hoagy — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 21:54:01 +0000

How very cool this command showed up on “stumbleupon” when I just spoke with my friend today regarding reaping old files on our Linux server . We were going to have a cron command every Mon/Wed/Sat but this….THIS frickin’ is sweet! So much thanks!

By: Ahnolds

Ahnolds — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:39:09 +0000

Awesome command. I’d like to add that it works on macs as well (no surprise for a *nix based system). Solved the annoying problem of my downloads folder getting cluttered because it keeps *everything* I ever save

Thanks

By: josh

josh — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 22:47:04 +0000

I think my question’s already been answered but I want to make sure I understand this right:

I have an FTP server for my firm. All the FTP directories sit at: /ftp/ftpsites/X/

so if put a wildcard in for the X will that ignore the main FTP site but delete all the subdata? so /ftp/ftpsites/*/* -mtime +5 -exec rm {} \;

I want it to save the parent directory, but that parent directory’s name will change depending on the FTP site.

Thanks in advance for your help!