deleting files less than 2 hours old? 3

[smacattack]

I can delete files which are a day old by exec
find /fred -name "*fred" -mtime -1 -exec rm {} \;

Is there any way of being more precise and saying less than 3 hours?

thanks

 

[JAFrank]

Someone just answered this for me a few days ago, so I'm happy to pass the information on!

Just use a decimal after mtime. In my case, I wanted to delete files which were more than 4 hours old. 4 hours divided by 24 hours in a day is .16, so I used mtime +.16. 3 hours would be .125 - I'm not sure how thin you can slice it, you might need to use .12 or .13.

Good luck,

Allen

 

[KenCunningham]

Allen - thanks for that. Could come in useful one day I guess! Cheers.

 

[Annihilannic]

Has this been tested on Solaris? Doesn't seem to work for me... (Solaris 8) Annihilannic.

 

[JAFrank]

My systems are a couple years old & running SunOS 5.6, but I have 4 of them using the following cron entry sucessfully:

0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * find /var/spool/srv_print/Karchive_iR110 -name "?f*" -mtime +.16 -exec rm -f {} \;

I haven't tried it on any newer versions, but I can't imagine why it wouldn't be backwards compatible.

Allen

 

[Annihilannic]

It just seems to silently ignore anything after the decimal point, for example:

[tt]# date
Fri Mar 28 15:09:05 GMT 2003
# ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 0 Mar 28 05:00 10hoursold
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 0 Mar 28 00:00 15hoursold
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 0 Mar 27 14:00 1dayold
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 0 Mar 28 14:00 1hourold
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 0 Mar 26 14:00 2daysold
-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 0 Mar 28 10:00 5hoursold
# find . -mtime +0
./1dayold
./2daysold
# find . -mtime +0.1
./1dayold
./2daysold
# find . -mtime +.1
./1dayold
./2daysold[/tt]

This is on a Solaris 2.6 system. It's a shame because it would be a handy feature! Annihilannic.

 

[JAFrank]

Annihilannic, you are absolutely correct. I swear I thought I tested this and had it work, but I just finally got back in front of one of these machines and looked at it a little closer. It seems to be treating any decimal < 1 as 1 - so it's still just trapping day-old stuff.

The man page is a little less clear than I would like (imagine that!), in that it says

In the descriptions, whenever n is used as a primary argument, it will be interpreted as a decimal integer optionally preceded by a plus (+) or minus (-)sign as follows ........

For some reason, when I read that, I paid more attention to the word &quot;Decimal&quot; than the word &quot;Integer&quot;, and assumed that they meant &quot;Fractional Number&quot;, rather than &quot;Base 10&quot;. I should have paid more attention to the fact that they used the word &quot;integer&quot;....

Is it just me, or is the term &quot;Decimal Integer&quot; an oxymoron?

Anyway, sorry for passing along inaccurate information.

Allen

 

[Annihilannic]

It's not really an oxymoron... as you say, &quot;integer&quot; means a whole negative or positive number (which could be any base), and &quot;decimal&quot; means base 10.

In other words... it's just you. ;-) Annihilannic.

 

[CaKiwi]

Getting back to the orginal problem, you could use

touch 04021200 /tmp/TIMESTAMP
find /fred -newer /tmp/TIMESTAMP -exec rm {} \;

to delete everything from noon today. CaKiwi

&quot;I love mankind, it's people I can't stand&quot; - Linus Van Pelt

 

[JAFrank]

CaKiwi, I see how that could work, but is there a way to have that touch always equal to 4 hours ago - so that if is were run in a cron, say hourly, it would delete every file that was more that 4 hours old at that moment....?

Thanks,

Allen

 

[CaKiwi]

JAFrank,

Maybe like this?

touch `date +%Y%m%d%H%M | awk -f date.awk` /tmp/TIMESTAMP

# ------ date.awk ------
BEGIN { m[1]=31;m[2]=28;m[3]=31;m[4]=30;m[5]=31;m[6]=30;
m[7]=31;m[8]=31;m[9]=30;m[10]=31;m[11]=30;m[12]=31;
}
{
yy=substr($0,1,4)
mm=substr($0,5,2)
dd=substr($0,7,2)
hh=substr($0,9,2)
mn=substr($0,11,2)

hh-=4;
if (hh<0) {
hh+=24
dd--;
if (dd==0) {
mm--;
if (mm==0) {
yy--;
mm=12;
}
dd = m[mm];
if (mm==2 && yy%4 == 0) dd=29;
}
}
printf (&quot;%2.2d%2.2d%2.2d%2.2d%d\n&quot;, mm, dd, hh, mn, yy)
}
CaKiwi

&quot;I love mankind, it's people I can't stand&quot; - Linus Van Pelt

 

[CaKiwi]

Or you may like to adapt the suggestions in faq80-953
I believe the method that changes TZ only works in the GMT timezone CaKiwi

&quot;I love mankind, it's people I can't stand&quot; - Linus Van Pelt

 

[julianbarnett]

Or use gawk (GNU awk) which can manipulate dates using strftime. systime gets the gurrent system time in secs since 00:00 1/1/1970.

touch `gawk 'BEGIN { print strftime(&quot;%Y%m%d%H%M&quot;,systime()-4*3600); }'` /tmp/TIMESTAMP

 

[JAFrank]

CaKiwi,

I realize that I am probably just being a moron, but I can't get your awk script to work for me - if I run it using your command line,

touch `date +%Y%m%d%H%M | awk -f date.awk` /tmp/TIMESTAMP

I end up with a new file in my local directory called

date +%Y%m%d%H%M | awk -f date.awk

and a new file in /tmp called

TIMESTAMP

.

If I run just the date part,

date +%Y%m%d%H%M | awk -f date.awk

I always get the same result - 040320002003

The result I would have expected, based on my understanding of touch, would be the current month, day, hour, minute - with year optional - so I should get something like 04021925.....Right???
At any rate, shouldn't I get a different result each time I run it?

Thanks for your help

Allen

 

[julianbarnett]

Make sure you are using back tick ` quotes rather than ' single quotes.

touch has 2 time formats the one you're using expects an optional 2 digit year suffix, the awk script is returning the 4 digit year. Use yy=substr($0,3,2). The hours should be 4 hours earlier than the time at which you called it.

Command I gave earlier had wrong date format as well

touch `gawk 'BEGIN { print strftime(&quot;%m%d%H%M%y&quot;,systime()-4*3600); }'` /tmp/TIMESTAMP

gawk is on the Solaris 8 free software CD or downloadeble from

http://www.sunfreeware.com

 

[bluelake]

date +%Y%m%d%H%M | awk -f date.awk | touch -- testfile

this command works well,i have tested it.

 

[CaKiwi]

I like julianbarnett's gawk program and bluelake's method of using touch

gawk 'BEGIN { print strftime(&quot;%m%d%H%M%y&quot;,systime()-4*3600); }' | touch -- /tmp/TIMESTAMP
CaKiwi

&quot;I love mankind, it's people I can't stand&quot; - Linus Van Pelt

 

[JAFrank]

I finally figured out what was messing me up - in CaKiwi's awk script above, I changed

printf ("%2.2d%2.2d%2.2d%2.2d%d\n", mm, dd, hh, mn, yy)

to

printf ("%2.2d%2.2d%2.2d%2.2d%d\n", yy, mm, dd, hh, mn)

And then changed the command line from

touch `date +%Y%m%d%H%M | awk -f date.awk` /tmp/TIMESTAMP

to

touch -t `date +%Y%m%d%H%M | awk -f date.awk` /tmp/TIMESTAMP

If I use the -t, I can send a date_time using CCYYmmddHHMM. Otherwise, I have to use mmddHHMMYY. The problem there is that the script wasn't returning 03 for the year - it was dropping the leading zero, so I'd end up with 040312453 instead of 0403124503.

So all of that works now, but I have another question - can the -newer option on the find command be inverted? Remember that the original question was deleting files more than x hours old.

If we use find with the -newer option, as in CaKiwi's original post, we would delete everything less than x hours old....

Thanks to everyone who has contributed!

Allen

 

[CaKiwi]

I misread the original post (the title misled me). Use

! -newer

to invert -newer
CaKiwi

&quot;I love mankind, it's people I can't stand&quot; - Linus Van Pelt

 

[JAFrank]

Thanks, that did the trick.

I ended up with the awk script, modified slightly as outlined above, and a quickie shell script called clean_archive with the following two lines:

touch -t `date +%Y%m%d%H%M | awk -f /allen/date.awk` /tmp/testfile
find /var/spool/srv_print/Karchive_iR110 -name "?f*" ! -newer /tmp/testfile -exec rm -f {}

The first line sets the date on /tmp/testfile to 4 hours ago, the second finds all files in the specified directory with &quot;f&quot; as the second character which are not newer than /tmp/testfile (ie: 4 hours) and deletes it.

I set up the following cron entry to run it on the hour:

0 * * * * /allen/clean_archive

Seems to work like a charm. I can't thank everyone enough for your help.

Thanks again,

Allen