RE: Purging files in the IFS by date (aka which Scott Klement utility to use :)

I forgot about prune. I believe the below will work in most cases (but do
read the next paragraph). You are correct: the * in *.c would need to be
escaped or enclosed in quotes. It'll work if there's no *.c file in the
current directory (the one from which the command is issued) but that's
dicey.

The thing I don't like about -prune is that the documentation I've seen is
sketchy and ambiguous. So are the results. For example, I would expect
this to return a list of all files in the current directory:
find . -prune
but it won't. Likewise, this returns an empty list except the lone dot:
find . -name "*" -prune

Dennis Lovelady
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dennislovelady
--
"Some see the problem in every opportunity, some see the opportunity in
every problem."
-- Kevin Cowling

I found this message on the net....

cd to the directory in question so that you can use . in the find
command,
then, for example,
find . \( ! -name . -prune \) -name \*.c -print

It seems to work, but I don't understand why *.c doesn't need to be
quoted....

Also, it seems that this doesn't find recursively, but I'm not sure if
the shell isn't processing the wildcard....
find /mypath/*.txt

I need a better understanding of how shells and unix type utilities
work! :)
Anybody know a good manual?

Thanks,
Charles




On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 8:44 AM, DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Charles,

  Sadly there IS a switch however it's not supported by find in PASE.
Worked through that myself just yesterday.

   - Larry

Dennis,

Is there a switch I'm not seeing to make find non-recursive?

Thanks,
Charles

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Dennis

Lovelady<iseries@xxxxxxxxxxxx>  wrote:

What's the currently recommended way of purging IFS files by date?

I found an old utility from Scott Klement, that comes really close

to

perfect.  The only issue is it purges everything in a given

directory,

I'd like to be able to pass a wildcard file name.  I haven't look

at

it in detail, but I suspect that modifying it to process file name
wildcards would be non-trivial.  Then again, perhaps not if I can

find

an good example of comparing a wild card value to another string,
(regex perhaps? but might be overkill).

find /my_path -mtime ${PURGE_DAYS} -name "${WILDCARD_NAMES}" -exec

rm {} \;

Dennis Lovelady
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dennislovelady
--
"Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major

categories

- those that don't work, those that break down, and those that get

lost."

        -- Russell Baker