Comments on: the most useful simple script i have

By: L.

L. — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 08:54:54 +0000

“Lee’s comment that mentions having a folder for items you’re about to delete”

…called the Trash on the Mac.

“But really, using someone else’s already-written tool is the correct way of doing things”

…which is why Waider and I use MacBooks.

Shouldn’t -d be what does the delete, rather than the other way around, to help avoid accidental deletion? Imagine if you had to do rm rather than rm -fr to silently nuke everything… looking at the semantics of rm via its man page, we already have -v, but wouldn’t -i be nice?

By: Waider

Waider — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 17:43:00 +0000

Hey, this horse won't move no matter how hard I beat it! All the find variants are missing a pretty important flag: -depth. This avoids the need for fancy flags to rmdir, error messages about trying to traverse directories you just deleted, etc. But really, using someone else's already-written tool is the correct (and Henry Spencer-approved, by implication (commandment #7)) way of doing things.

By: Jake

Jake — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 22:46:07 +0000

You can mitigate funny characters in find with :
find “$tmpdir” -type f -mtime +7 -print 0 | xargs -0 rm -fv

… which changes the seps in the find output to be nulls, and makes xargs expect null sep’d items.

By: Danny O'Brien

Danny O'Brien — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 19:16:20 +0000

It looks like tmpwatch has been replaced (in fink and in Debian) with the package-most-like-an-EC-Comic, tmpreaper.

By: Danny O'Brien

Danny O'Brien — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 19:11:56 +0000

Bluefoo gives pretty much the reason why it’s in Python. After several iterations of writing it in find (and having spaces and strange characters mess things up), I just thought, screw it, this is ridiculous, I’ll just spell it out s-l-o-w-l-y and methodically in Python, so at least I’ll be able to understand what went wrong when it messes up. It’s all part of my sinister plan to get good at one language, rather than know a little bit about a lot of them.

Of course, the best option of all is Waider’s — find somebody who has already done this for you. Thanks!

By: Bluefoo

Bluefoo — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 17:18:42 +0000

The find example above is reasonable, but instead of the -exec it may prove safer (with strange filenames) to use the extensions of GNU find.

find “$tmpdir” -type f -mtime +7 -delete
find “$tmpdir” -type d -exec rmdir “{}” \;

That should delete files not modified for 7 days and remove all old directories that are empty (or made empty by this process) since rmdir should only touch empty directories. You may want to experiment with the -p option of rmdir to make sure you get all the parents otherwise depending on the find order you may have some left.

By: Don

Don — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 14:14:52 +0000

@manu – my career has taken me away from hands-on scripting/programming but I was able to do so much with ksh and the sed/awk family that perl & python were rarely necesary (for the sort of tasks I was trying to accomplish). I always like simple.

By: Christian Neukirchen

Christian Neukirchen — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 12:05:12 +0000

A different approach, that works well for me who is paranoid (or romantic?) about keeping old stuff: http://chneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2006/01/keeping-your-home-clean-with-mess.html

By: manu

manu — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 10:28:50 +0000

Er, that’s probably a stupid question, but why don’t you just use find? That’d be a one-liner:

find "$tmpdir" -atime +7 -exec rm -r {} \;

By: Waider

Waider — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 09:20:17 +0000

gah, neglected to close that a tag. oh well.