Re: Cleanup IFS? -- MIDRANGE-L

Hi Ron,

Sorry, I guess I should have been a little more specific.
I have a TEMP folder on the IFS that is used by various utilities to create
extracts/reports in various formats (PDF, CSV, TXT, etc), these files are
usually downloaded right away or at the very least within 24 hours via a
user submitting a job to send them. I want to delete (almost) everything in
the TEMP folder that is older than a week. Is there a command or utility
that I can use to do this?

Use QShell's find command. QShell is a unix-like shell that's included onyour OS/400 CDs, and costs nothing if you already have OS/400.

In QShell the FIND utility is used to locate files with certain attributesin the directory structure. So the following would find all of the filesthat haven't been accessed in 7 days in the /tmp/reports directory (or anyof it's subdirectories):


    find /tmp/reports -atime +7 -print

The output of one QShell command can be converted to parameters that areadded on to the end of another command. This is done by piping the outputto the xargs program.


    find /tmp/reports -atime +7 -print | xargs rm -rf

So, if find woud list "file1.pdf" "file2.pdf" "file3.pdf" then xargs wouldbuild & run a command string that says:


    rm -rf file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf

The "rm" command is the Unix command for deleting (removing) a file.every parameter you pass to it will be deleted.

The only problem with this code is that there's a limit to the size of asingle command-line in QShell. In V5R3 they expanded that limitdramatically, but it was a sharp limitation in older releases. If insteadof using XARGS, you can have the FIND utility delete each fileindividually:


    find /tmp/reports -atime +7 -exec rm -rf {} \;

FIND will take everything between the "-exec" and the "\;" and it'll useit as a command. It'll replace {} with the name of the file, and it'llrun the command.

So, in this case, it'll run "rm -rf file1.pdf" then, it'll run "rm -rffile2.pdf" and so on for every file that it finds.

This solution is MUCH slower than the XARGS one because it has to submit anew job to run a new command for every single filename, whereas XARGS ranall of the filenames in one job. But XARGS had that sharp limitation forthe size of a single command line.

Note that any of these commands can be run from a CL program. Forexample:


    STRQSH CMD('find /tmp/reports -atime +7 -exec rm -rf {} \;')

In fact, if you're more comfortable with CL (as I suspect most iSeriespeople are) it might make sense to use QShell to write the filenames to afile, then you can process that file from CL.


    CRTPF MYLIB/MYFILE RCDLEN(1000)
    STRQSH CMD('find /tmp/reports -atime +7 -print > +
                /QSYS.LIB/MYLIB.LIB/MYFILE.FILE/MYFILE.MBR')

Now you have a file called MYFILE that contains the list of files. Youcan delete them:


LOOP:  RCVF
       MONMSG CPF0864 EXEC(CHGVAR &DONE VALUE('1'))

       IF (&DONE *NE '1') DO
           RMVLNK OBJLNK(&MYFILE)
           GOTO LOOP
       ENDDO

I'm pretty sure that I've explained all of this on this list severaltimes, so please check the mailing list archives for more info.

  http://archive.midrange.com

---
Scott Klement  http://www.scottklement.com