On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 15:05 +0100, Dan Track wrote: > Hi > > I need to delete files in my /opt/html/ directory that were > created/modified ON the 20th of March this year? Is there a way for me > to do this? ---- first - make a backup of the entire directory because this type of thing is destructive and there is no 'undo' option Then you should probably be aware of the man page for find which has some examples that does things similar to this but you will want to test the 'find' command before you add the part to 'rm' The next problem is that the 'created' time isn't retained but the modified time is... find /opt/html -mtime +12 sounds about right to me...this should give you all files modified since March 20th... then you could output this to file... find /opt/html -mtime +12 > /tmp/modified-since-march-20.txt then if you wanted to exclude stuff modified since march-21st (so as not to delete them) find /opt/html -mtime +11 > /tmp/modified-since-march-21.txt then you could 'diff' the difference to get a file list of those for March 12th Here's an example... # find . -ctime +5 > /tmp/files1.txt # find . -ctime +1 > /tmp/files2.txt # diff /tmp/files1.txt /tmp/files2.txt and then to clean up the diff, I add some other things... # diff /tmp/files1.txt /tmp/files2.txt |grep '/' | sed 's/> //g' and if I output this to a file, I could use that for deleting purposes... # diff /tmp/files1.txt /tmp/files2.txt |grep '/' | sed 's/> //g' \ > /tmp/file-deletion-list.txt and finally, my command to delete... for file in `cat /tmp/file-deletion-list.txt`; do rm $file; done # note, those are backticks and not single quotes Mostly though, adjust as you go along and test this as your mileage will definitely vary. Craig
