I currently use a command that searches a directory and deletes 5 day old files.
find /path/to/files* -mtime +5 -exec rm {} \;
I run it from the command line and it works fine. But when I put it in a .sh file it says find /path/to/files*: No such file or directory.
There is only two lines in the shell script:
#! /usr/bin/env bash
find /path/to/files* -mtime +5 -exec rm {} \;
How can I rewrite the script so that it works?
`
The error happens if there are currently no files matching the wildcard, presumably because none have been created since you deleted them previously.
The argument to find should be the directory containing the files, not the filenames themselves, since find will automatically search the directory. If you want to restrict the filenames, use the -name option to specify the wildcard.
And if you don't want to go into subdirectories, use the -maxdepth option.
find /path/to -maxdepth 1 -type f -name 'files*' -mtime +5 -delete
This works:
#! /usr/bin/env bash
find /home/ubuntu/directory -type f -name 'filename*' -mtime +4 -delete
Here is an example:
find /home/ubuntu/processed -type f -name 'output*' -mtime +4 -delete
Related
Had same log rotation files in linux environment and there they work. In Solaris I have problems with running those scrips:
The main purpose of scripts is to delete all logs that are older than 30 days and zip all logs that are older than 5 days. -not -name is used because I want to operate only on rotated log files, for example something.log.20181102 because .log files are current ones and I don't want to touch them.
#!/bin/bash
find ./logs -mindepth 1 -mtime +30 -type f -not -name "*.log" -delete
find ./logs -mtime +5 -not -name "*.log" -exec gzip {} \;
Problems occur with -mindepth and -not because it gives errors:
find: bad option -not
find: [-H | -L] path-list predicate-list
Based on search I have to use -prune somehow in the find, but I am not too sure how to.
If you look at the man page for find(1) on Linux (or gfind(1) on Solaris), you'll see
-not expr
Same as ! expr, but not POSIX compliant.
So you should be able to replace -not with !, though you'll need to escape it from the shell, either with a backslash or with single quotes:
find ... \! -name "*.log" ...
Note that on Solaris, there's a command called logadm which is intended to help you take care of things like this, and may be worth investigating, unless you want to have the exact same behavior on both Solaris and Linux.
With the help of #Danek Duvall and with some searching I got it working:
find ./logs -mtime +30 -type f ! -name "*.log" -exec rm -f {} \;
find ./logs -mtime +5 ! -name "*.log" -exec gzip {} \;
It deletes all log files that are older than 30 days and then zips the ones that are older than 5 days.
On a unix server, I'm trying to figure out how to remove a file, say "example.xls", from any subdirectories that start with v0 ("v0*").
I have tried something like:
find . -name "v0*" -type d -exec find . -name "example.xls" -type f
-exec rm {} \;
But i get errors. I have a solution but it works too well, i.e. it will delete the file in any subdirectory, regardless of it's name:
find . -type f -name "example.xls" -exec rm -f {} \;
Any ideas?
You will probably have to do it in two steps -- i.e. first find the directories, and then the files -- you can use xargs to make it in a single line, like
find . -name "v0*" -type d | \
xargs -l -I[] \
find [] -name "example.xls" -type f -exec rm {} \;
what it does, is first generating a list of viable directory name, and let xargs call the second find with the names locating the file name within that directory
Try:
find -path '*/v0*/example.xls' -delete
This matches only files named example.xls which, somewhere in its path, has a parent directory name that starts with v0.
Note that since find offers -delete as an action, it is not necessary to invoke the external executable rm.
Example
Consider this directory structure:
$ find .
.
./a
./a/example.xls
./a/v0
./a/v0/b
./a/v0/b/example.xls
./a/v0/example.xls
We can identify files example.xls who have one of their parent directories named v0*:
$ find -path '*/v0*/example.xls'
./a/v0/b/example.xls
./a/v0/example.xls
To delete those files:
find -path '*/v0*/example.xls' -delete
Alternative: find only those files directly under directory v0*
find -regex '.*/v0[^/]*/example.xls'
Using the above directory structure, this approach returns one file:
$ find -regex '.*/v0[^/]*/example.xls'
./a/v0/example.xls
To delete such files:
find -regex '.*/v0[^/]*/example.xls' -delete
Compatibility
Although my tests were performed with GNU find, both -regex and -path are required by POSIX and also supported by OSX.
I would like to delete old files from multiple directories but there is a wild card for one of the path attributes. So I'm trying to loop through each of those directories without specifying each one. I think I'm almost there but I'm not sure how to cd into the specific directory to delete the relevant files.
#! /bin/bash
DELETE_SEARCH_DIR=/apps/super/userprojects/elasticsearch/v131/node*/elasticsearch-1.3.1/logs/
for entry in `ls $DELETE_SEARCH_DIR`; do
find $path -name "*super*" -type f -mtime +10 -print -delete
#find . -type f -name $entry -exec rm -f {} \;
done
Any ideas on how to get into the specific directory and apply the delete?
find can search in multiple directories. You can do it like this:
DELETE_SEARCH_DIR=/apps/super/userprojects/elasticsearch/v131/node*/elasticsearch-1.3.1/logs
find $DELETE_SEARCH_DIR -type f -name '*super*' -mtime +10 -print -delete
I have many files without file extention. Now I want to add .txt to all files. I tried the following but it gives an error, mv: rename . to ..txt: Invalid argument.
How can I achieve this?
find . -iname "*.*" -exec bash -c 'mv "$0" "$0.txt"' {} \;
You're nearly there!
Just add -type f to only deal with files:
find . -type f -exec bash -c 'mv "$0" "$0.txt"' {} \;
If your mv handles the -n option, you might want to use it (that's the option to not overwrite existing files).
The error your having is because . is one of the first found by found, and your system complains (rightly) when you want to rename .! with the -type f you're sure this won't happen. Now if you wanted to act on everything inside your directory, you would, e.g., add -mindepth 1 at the beginning of the find command (as . is considered depth 0).
It is not very clear in your question, but what if you want to add the extension .txt to all files that don't have an extension? (we'll agree that to have an extension means to have a period in the name). In this case, you'll use the negation of -name '*.*' as follows:
find . -type f \! -name '*.*' -exec bash -c 'mv "$0" "$0.txt"' {} \;
I've got a script that finds files within folders older than 30 days:
find /my/path/*/README.txt -mtime +30
that'll then produce a result such as
/my/path/jobs1/README.txt
/my/path/job2/README.txt
/my/path/job3/README.txt
Now the part I'm stuck at is I'd like to remove the folder + files that are older than 30 days.
find /my/path/*/README.txt -mtime +30 -exec rm -r {} \;
doesn't seem to work. It's only removing the readme.txt file
so ideally I'd like to just remove /job1, /job2, /job3 and any nested files
Can anyone point me in the right direction ?
This would be a safer way:
find /my/path/ -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 2 -type f -name 'README.txt' -mtime +30 -printf '%h\n' | xargs echo rm -r
Remove echo if you find it already correct after seeing the output.
With that you use printf '%h\n' to get the directory of the file, then use xargs to process it.
You can just run the following command in order to recursively remove directories modified more than 30 days ago.
find /my/path/ -type d -mtime +30 -exec rm -rf {} \;