Automatically Expire or Remove Files Uploaded to our FTP Site

[stevenriz]

Hi everyone, we have now multiple internal people transferring files to our FTP site for their various contacts to logon and download. Is there any way to automatically expire those files so they don't stay there forever taking up space? If people don't clean up after themselves, we will quickly run out of space. Any suggestions? thanks!
Steve

 

[mrregan]

You could have a cron job that runs every day. This command would get rid of files over five 5 days old:

cd /ftpdirectory
find . -mtime +5 | xargs rm

 

[Annihilannic]

To handle subdirectories they may create, I would enhance that with:

cd /ftpdirectory
find . -type f -mtime +5 | xargs rm 
find . -type d -mtime +5 | xargs rmdir

Annihilannic.

 

[stefanwagner]

At least gnu-find has the ability to delete files and directories as well with an uniform command (called '-delete' for no obvious reason)

find /ftpdirectory -mtime +5 -delete

And you don't need xargs, with it's probable problems with blanks and newlines.

If your find does not contain -delete, use

find /ftpdirectory -mtime +5 -type f -exec rm {} \;

and

find /ftpdirectory -mtime +5 -type d -exec rmdir {} \;

don't visit my homepage:

http://home.arcor.de/hirnstrom/minis/index.html

 

[Annihilannic]

True about xargs, an important consideration when it's a "public" destination that will probably contain evil filenames.

find ... -print0 | xargs -0 rm is a good workaround, but again that's a GNU-ish extension... xargs is only of real benefit if you are going to be removing thousands of files and performance is a concern.

Annihilannic.