rm old directory

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: rm old directory by marto (Cardinal) on Jul 22, 2008 at 14:55 UTC
This question gets asked every so often around here, see How do I delete files based on their timestamp? from the Categorized Questions and Answers section, How do I find and delete files based on age? and use Super Search to find more examples. Also you posted this question in the wrong part of the forum, see How do I post a question effectively? and the PerlMonks FAQ. Martin	[reply]
Re: rm old directory by swampyankee (Parson) on Jul 22, 2008 at 15:05 UTC
First, define what you mean by "60-day old directory." Do you mean the directory was created 60 days ago or the oldest file contained within it is 60 days old? I believe that most O/S mark a directory as modified (change it's mod time) only if a file has been added or deleted (this includes moved), but not if a file has been changed, i.e., `touching` an existing file won't necessarily change the mod time on the including directory¹. The actual function you would is either rmdir or rmtree from the File::Path module. Unlink won't remove directories, unless "you are superuser and the -U flag is supplied to Perl." It also warns against using unlink to remove directories in all circumstances. added in update ¹ …of course, these same comments apply to directories within the top level directory, and their sub-directories, and so forth. Recursion! Information about American English usage here and here. Floating point issues? Please read this before posting. — emc	[reply]
Re: rm old directory by moritz (Cardinal) on Jul 22, 2008 at 14:57 UTC
In the shell with `find (1)` and `rm (1)`, in perl with File::Find, File::Path::rmtree and the file test operators.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: rm old directory by shoness (Friar) on Jul 22, 2008 at 20:30 UTC
`unix%> /usr/bin/find . -type d -mtime +60 -exec /bin/rm -rf {} \;` [download] replace "." with the directory you want to search below "-type d" says "directories" "-mtime +60" says "not modified in 60 days" (also consider "-atime" for "last accessed (aka "read") time" or "-ctime" for "change time", depending on how you measure "age".) "-exec" passes matching directory names to "/bin/rm -rf". Edited: per moritz's suggestion, recommend "mtime" instead of "atime" although it's all up to you...	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: rm old directory by moritz (Cardinal) on Jul 22, 2008 at 20:56 UTC
Relying on atime is generally a bad idea. I for one disable atime tracking during mounting, because IMHO it's a bad idea to have a side effect from every read. On my box your script would thus remove many directories that should stay. So rather rely on mtime.	[reply]
Re^3: rm old directory by Argel (Prior) on Jul 23, 2008 at 00:06 UTC
This is probably an edge case, but we had a tftp directory that we were cleaning up based on last modified time. The problem we ran into is that Windows/Samba and Konqueror all maintained the original timestamps on the file. So when someone copied a file created back in 2006 over to the system it got deleted fairly quickly! Our workaround was to make sure the files were not being backed up and then use the last access time instead of the last modified time.	[reply]
Re: rm old directory by Anonymous Monk on Jul 22, 2008 at 22:20 UTC
Well, in the bash shell I'd say something like: `find . -mtime -59 -type d -print \| xargs rm -rf` [download] (the argument may not be exactly right, do a man on find for the right args, and I'd also do whatever option xargs has to not execute if nothing comes down the pipe, but then this is a perl question, so ...) Well, so in perl I'd do something dumb like run the 'find' command above (without the rm), fiddle with the output in any way I felt reasonable, then either use a perl-based 'rm -rf' or run another shell command. Not very perl-ish, I'm afraid, and probably pushing the 'more than one way to do it' a bit too far, but if you wanted to perl-ize it more do a cpan lookup for a 'find' replacement (which I'm sure you could write or find - I mean, its just 'open directory', get its age, and recurse), and for a 'rm -rf' replacment). Oh, goodness: there is a 'find' at http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?File::Find but it doesn't check the status. Perhaps you should check out 'find2perl', to which you give my above script (or something similar), and it will spit out the perl... see http://search.cpan.org/~nwclark/perl-5.8.8/x2p/find2perl.PL	[reply] [d/l]
Re: rm old directory by girarde (Hermit) on Jul 22, 2008 at 22:41 UTC
This question is kind of OS specific.	[reply]
Re: rm old directory by DrHyde (Prior) on Jul 24, 2008 at 09:48 UTC
I just threw last year's Yellow Pages in the bin. Maybe that'll work for you too.	[reply]


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