[ale] bash script

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Tue 2007-09-11 10:18:17 -0400, Marvin, International Martian of Mystery wrote:

> I'd like some feedback/critique for a script I'm running as a cron job
> daily on a box I administrate.  It's supposed to delete all the files it
> finds that are 5 days or older.  

you don't say what other directories there are under
/var/www/zm/events.  For example, are you deliberately skipping
events/{4,7,8} for some reason?

Also, modern versions of GNU find have a -delete action [0].

i'm not entirely sure this does what you want, but i think it might
be:

find /var/www/zm/events/{1,2,3,5,6,9,1{0,1,2,3,4,5}} -mtime +5 -a -type f -a ! -name '*.log' -delete

(entirely untested, i'm afraid)

notes:

 * i used -mtime +5 instead of -mtime 5 to catch files modified > 5
   days ago.

 * i'm explicitly representing the conjunction of expressions in the
   find statement (with -a), because i'm not confident that
   conjunction is the default case.

 * i moved the negated test (! -name '*.log') to the end to make sure
   the negation doesn't apply to anything else.  Other folks more
   confident in their knowledge of find's operator precedence might
   not care.

 * i've added a test only for normal files (-type f), since you say
   you want to delete files.  this avoids deleting subdirs, etc.

 * you can test this command by replacing -delete with -print, if you
   like.

 * if you really want to do this for all subdirs, not just the ones
   specified above with curly-brace expansion, it'd probably be
   simpler and more robust to begin the above command with:
   
    find /var/www/zm/events/*

hth,

        --dkg

[0] https://www.debian-administration.org/users/Steve/weblog/176
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