CRON Job

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi all,

Pretty new to CRON but have been messing with Ubuntu for a while now
Here is the situation/problem I have run into you.

I currently run a very basic back procedure by executing a daily CRON job which copies all data from one directory to a USB drive & date stamps the copy:-

cp -r /var/ /media/USB$(date +/%F)

Which has been working prefectly well, however when I checked it last I realised the USB drive had filled up & there was no space to continue the backup.

Is there an easy way to check the date & overwrite the oldest copy, therfore never filling the drive up so the backup will always be successful.

Thanks for looking
2scoops

2

This will remove the 30days old files and keep the new ones.. In the place of "dot" use the USB path

find . -mtime +30 -exec rm {} \; ; cp -r /var/ /media/USB$(date +/%F)
3

thanks for posting so promptly

so

find /media/USB$(date +/%F) will locate the folder

-mtime will work out what age the folder is depending on on the argument (+30 equates to 30 days)

-exec is to execute

rm {} will then remove the oldest folder

then it will run the original script again

Is that it in a nutshell :slight_smile: