Home / ubuntu / Questions / 1289299
Accepted
Harsha
Asked: 2020-11-04 04:01:52 +0800 CST

Script to delete files older than 2 days and log file name to a file with creation time and deletion time

  • 772

I'm trying to delete files older than 2 days and write the deleted file names to a log file along with creation/modified time and deletion time.

Eg: filename creationTime deletetionTime

test1 11-08-2020T08:38:16+05:30 12-08-2020T10:18:42+05:30
test2 11-08-2020T08:38:16+05:30 12-08-2020T10:18:42+05:30

I have script to delete files older than 2 days and log the filename to file but not getting how to print along with creation/modified date and deletion time.

#!/bin/bash

path="/test"
filename=*.txt
logfile=/tmp/$(date +%d-%m-%Y).log
days=-60

find $path -mmin $days -name "*.wav" -type f -print0 -delete | xargs -0 basename -a >> $logfile

Can someone help me to achieve that above output?

scripts command-line bash

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Once you have deleted a file, there is no longer a possibility to stat it for atime/mtime information.

    As well, the -printf action in GNU find has a %f specifier for printing the file's basename, so there's really no need for the external xargs / basename combo.

    So you could get the basename and modification time in a -printf like

    find "$path" -type f -name "*.wav" -mmin "$days" -printf '%f\t%T+\n'

    You could then execute a date command just before (or just after) the -delete to get the deletion time:

    find "$path" -type f -name "*.wav" -mmin "$days" -printf '%f\t%T+\t' -exec date '+%F+%H:%M:%S.%N' \; # -delete

    (remove the # to proceed with the deletions only once you are happy that it is doing what you want).

    For other date/time format options see the relevant man pages - I chose %T+ for the GNU long form modification time in find, then chose date format +%F+%H:%M:%S.%N to mimic that.

    • 2