Find

[RJSHA1]

Hello there,
I am trying to write a line in Unix that take all the files over 11 days old in the current directory and moves them to another diretory.

So far I have tried

mv $(find . -mtime +11) /apps/data/

and

mv `find . -mtime +11` /apps/data

Neither work

What am I doing wrong

 

[MikeLacey]

Hi there,

First step, as you obviously know from the things you're trying to do, is to get a list of the files you want to move - and to verify that this list is correct.

So -- on its own, does the find command that you're trying:

find . -mtime +11

give you the correct list of files? Mike
michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com
Email welcome if you're in a hurry or something -- but post in tek-tips as well please, and I will post my reply here as well.

 

[RJSHA1]

Mike,
Yes it does - I cannot remember how to do the second bit - where I pass the results to the move command

 

[MikeLacey]

Your first command looked ok to me, in principle:

mv $(find . -mtime +11) /apps/data/

but a couple of things do occur to to me.

1 - How many files does the find command return? There may well be problems if it returns more than 255 as the shell will start to complain at that point.

2 - Which shell are you using? the $() construct will work ok with ksh or the posix shell (recent versions of sh, in other words) but I don't think that csh or bash support $()

3 - I never do this. I *never* mv so many files at once, it's to easy to delete them all by mistake (believe me...). I would do it in two stages, cp and then - when I can see that went ok - rm the old files.

You say that neither work, what happens? Do you get an error message? Mike
michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com
Email welcome if you're in a hurry or something -- but post in tek-tips as well please, and I will post my reply here as well.

 

[KenCunningham]

Don't you need to specify an action with the find? - probably '-print' so that the filenames are returned? e.g:

mv `find . -mtime +11 -print` /apps/data

Haven't tested this, but hope it helps.

 

[MikeLacey]

-print is on by default nowadays, AFAIK Mike
michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com
Email welcome if you're in a hurry or something -- but post in tek-tips as well please, and I will post my reply here as well.

 

[KenCunningham]

MIke - I agree, but you never can tell how old a system is(perhaps RSJH1 could let us know?) I just couldn't understand why the command wasn't working and this seemed an obvious option.

Cheers.

Ken

 

[bjverzal]

If you have a long list of files, remember the "xargs" pipe. It will break the list down into a user-defined length of filenames.

Bill.

 

[RJSHA1]

THe system I am using is Sun Solaris 4.0, what I would like to do after the find is to move the files I have found to another directory.

 

[KenCunningham]

Given that it's Solaris 4, have you tried to include the '-print' argument as above? Let us know what happens.

 

[RJSHA1]

Cheers guys I was missing the -print option at the end of the find

 

[MikeLacey]

LOL! You were right Ken! I'll remember to include questions about the old stuff in future. <grin> Thanks. Mike
michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com
Email welcome if you're in a hurry or something -- but post in tek-tips as well please, and I will post my reply here as well.

 

[KenCunningham]

No worries, Mike. One of my rules is that if all else fails look for the obvious! ;-)