squash@math.ufl.edu (Jonathan King) (03/16/91)
My .logout contain a call to _find to automatically remove files satisfying certain criteria. I would like the file's name to provide the criterion. For example, files letter.rm.60.tex c_hack.rm.120.c would be automatically removed if unmodified for 60 and 120 days. (Of course, I could put the specific numbers "60" and "120" into my call to _find. I would like this to work, automatically, for all numbers that are valid to, say, the -mtime switch of _find.) Can this be done by _find or by some other program? Thank you. Jonathan squash@math.ufl.edu
jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) (03/18/91)
(I have cross-posted this response to comp.unix.questions, and directed Followups there. I don't really see any reason to consider this a wizard-level discussion.) In article <SQUASH.91Mar15194116@heat.math.ufl.edu>, squash@math.ufl.edu (Jonathan King) writes: |> [Asks if there's any utility that can parse a filename and figure out from |> it when to delete it.] The only way find is going to be able to do this is if you give it explicit arguments for each number you want to check for; this doesn't seem to be what you want to do. In general, the utilities that can do string manipulation understand nothing at all about file modification times, and the utilities that understand mtimes don't understand how to do any string manipulation, so you'll have to use multiple processes to get anything approaching the functionality you're trying to achieve, unless you write your own C program to do it. Or, you could use perl. Perl can do the recursive file search, it can parse the filenames in order to extract from them a number to check against, and it can stat the file in order to get the modification time. All this in one process. No, I'm not going to volunteer a perl script to do this. I'm not enough of a perl guru to be able to throw one together in five minutes. I'm sure Randall or Tom or Larry will jump right in and suggest something. :-) -- Jonathan Kamens USnail: MIT Project Athena 11 Ashford Terrace jik@Athena.MIT.EDU Allston, MA 02134 Office: 617-253-8085 Home: 617-782-0710