Perhaps "scale" isn't the best term. The "scaling" I was referring to
is the amount of code complexity for what should be an incredibly simple
operation. For every file/directory you want to delete, whereas it
should require only one extra line in a tidy: statement, setting classes
and stuff to do the same thing means adding (at a minimum) two lines of
code (one to set the class, one to delete the file), not to mention the
fact that you now have the same information ("This file will be
deleted") in three places: a shellcommands block, a classes: block, and
implicitly through the definition of the class.
It shouldn't be necessary to resort to a shellcommand or extra classes
just to force a file to disappear from the system. "age=0", to me,
means "no matter how old it is, delete it!", aka "force".
Unfortunately that is not the case. While I have workarounds in place
for situations like the one I describe here, I would like to see future
versions of cfengine do the "right thing" in this situation, or at least
provide some way of letting "tidy" throw caution to the wind and just
blow away whatever files it is told to.
"disable" sounds like a suitable workaround for some things (though I do
not know if it is susceptible to the time shift problem), but there are
many cases where I just want the file *gone*.
Paul Krizak 5900 E. Ben White Blvd. MS 625
Advanced Micro Devices Austin, TX 78741
Linux/Unix Systems Engineering Phone: (512) 602-8775
Microprocessor Solutions Sector
Brendan Strejcek wrote:
Paul Krizak wrote:
yeah that's not exactly what I'm looking for either. It doesn't scale
at all for large groups of files, nevermind big trees of stuff (for
example, we delete /usr/local, all of it, during install).
How does tidy scale better? You could use IsDir rather than FileExists
along with the -r option or "find" with some criteria and a -exec
option.
Here is a hack to get a big recursive delete to return quickly:
/bin/sh -c '( /bin/rm -rf /some/path & )'
Usually when we need to do a true "force" of a delete, we just do a
shellcommand of rm -f, and let it keep trying to delete the missing
files forever.
Hmm, I would at least wrap it with a class like my previous example.
I'd much rather use tidy in all situations, however.
"disable" might also be an option.
Best,
Brendan
--
Senior System Administrator
The University of Chicago
Department of Computer Science
http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/people/brendan
http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~brendan
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