[seems the list doesn't like my e-mail provider today (it isn't the only one -- got a bounce from another list as well), so I'm posting via the newsgroup. OTOH, the news<-->e-mail link seems down as well so eventually this may double post...] On Monday 21 April 2003 13:23, Donna Garverick wrote: > 39 : run main.pub.vesoft;& > 40 : info="purge > ./logs/access_log.@(credate<today-30);yes" > > is there a shell-ish way of doing the same thing i'm doing > with mpex? - d I'm finding "find" is a close equivalent to MPEX's generic "file selection" capability. For dates & times, *nix provides access, modify, and "state change" [whatever that means...] These are referenced as amin/atime, mmin/mtime, and cmin/ctime respectively. the x"min" is in minutes while x"time" is in "n*24 hours" [a fancy way of saying "days"] In addition, you need to specify a + or - to get greater-than or less-than functionality [and without a specifier, it means "exactly"] To list the files you are after, I think this will work: find . -ctime +30 -daystart -name 'access_log*' the "daystart" parameter normalizes things to midnight vs. "right this second". This list can be fed to the "rm" command like this: rm `find . -ctime +30 -daystart -name 'access_log*'` note that the find command and parameters are surrounded by "back-quotes" [usually left of the number 1 on the top row] Note also that "c" is "file status changed", not neccesarilly "file was created" -- I believe changing something like ownership or ACL type info counts as a "status change", but 99% of the time this will work out "ok" [and in this case, the 1% where it fails will just leave an extra file around for a few days] I'm also finding find to be finicky -- any niggling mistake and "find" returns nothing at all, which may be ok, but in some cases "nothing" defaults to "everything" for the command issued against it -- for instance: ls `find . -false` acts as if you just type "ls", which will display everything... -- Yet another blog: http://osnut.homelinux.net * To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, * * etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *