How to delete files in UNIX using shell script

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

I have the following task to perform using shell script.

The user will provide a directory name along with a date. The script will delete all the files in the specified directory that was created earlier to that date. Also it should display the number of files that has been deleted.

Please help experts! Thanks in advance!

2

This deletes files in a directory tree that are less than 5 days old, and asks if it is okay to delete each file:

find /path/to/directory -mtime -5  -ok  rm -f {} \;

You need to do a search on the FAQ here on the ofrums for date arithmetic, so your script can calculcate the number of days to put in the above command, or a coomand like it.

3

Thanks for the reply.

Still there is one issue left. How can we determine the number of files it has deleted after we run the script ?

4

Piping the previous command into wc

find /path/to/directory -mtime +5 -ok rm -f {} \; | wc -l

will give you a line count.

If you're confident in what you're deleting, and you VERIFY that the directory provided isn't a system directory, you can streamline the command without a prompt. Also, add one more exprssion to make certain you're deleting only FILES:

find /path/to/directory -mtime +5 -type f -print -exec rm -f {} \; 1>/tmp/out
wc -l /tmp/out

The print command displays the file being deleted. I'd recommend saving the output for review. You can then do a line count on the output file.

5

else have an illustration as follows,

delcnt=0
for files in `find /path/to/directory -mtime -5 -print`
do
   echo "Deleting file $file"
   /bin/rm $file
   delcnt=$(($delcnt + 1))
done

echo "deleted $delcnt files"
6

Hi,

find /path/to/directory -mtime -5 -ok rm -f {} \

is working fine. But there is one more concern. This command deletes all the files in the specified directory along with files in sub-directories also.

The requirement is like, it should delete files that are 5 Days old only in the directory specified and not the subdirectories within it.

Any idea on how to do that?

Thanks in advance

7

Adding -maxdepth 1 would do the trick, this way the find command only searches 1 level deep in the directory structure.

The complete command looks like this :

find /path/to/directory -mtime -5 -maxdepth 1 -ok rm -f {} \

Edit: I noticed this is an old thread, but I wanted to add a solution for completeness and to help people who would stumble upon this thread in the future.

8

please look at the date of the last post.