I want it, whether it is already extant or you write it... On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 4:59 PM, Jonathan Swartz <[email protected]> wrote:
> At various places around our system we want to clean up files older than x, > and sometimes prune empty directories. Naturally we have to be careful doing > this lest we accidentally blow away far too many of the wrong files. > > I'm thinking about a Perl module and accompanying script with this > interface: > > cleanup_files.pl --age=age --dir=dir --name=name [--dry-run] > [--prune-empty-dirs] > > where age can be specified as "1h", "2day", etc., and name is a required > glob pattern, and dir is checked to make sure it is sufficiently deep (e.g. > can't use /). --dry-run tells you what would be deleted. --prune-empty-dirs > also causes empty dirs to be pruned. The script would report at its end how > many files and directories were removed. > > The idea is to have a convenient, but safe, one-liner to put in a cron for > each directory that needs periodic cleaning. > > In the past we've done the old "find ... | xargs rm -f", but it doesn't > have the safety checks, directory pruning, or reporting. > > Does anyone else think this is (mildly) valuable? Am I reinventing the > wheel, in terms of Perl libraries or other Unix utilities besides basic > find? > > Thanks > Jon > > -- Check out my LEGO blog at http://www.brickpile.com/ View my photos at http://flickr.com/photos/billward/ Follow me at http://twitter.com/williamward
