Bash script, match on dates like?

Question

I'm writing a script to remove some build artifacts older than 1 week.

The files have names in the form artifact-1.1-200810391018.exe.

How do I go about removing only the files that are greater than 1 week old, excluding the time in hours and minutes at the end of the date-time-stamp?

Currently it is removing all of the files in the directory.

#!/bin/sh NIGHTLY_LOCATIONS=( "/foo" "/bar" ) ARTIFACT_PREFIX="artifact-*-" NUM_TO_KEEP=7 for home in $(seq 0 $((${#NIGHTLY_LOCATIONS[@]} - 1))); do echo "Removing artifacts for" ${NIGHTLY_LOCATIONS[$location]} for file in `find ${NIGHTLY_LOCATIONS[$location]} -name "$ARTIFACT_PREFIX*"`; do keep=true for day in $(seq 0 $((${NUM_TO_KEEP} - 1))); do date=`date --date="$day days ago" +%Y%m%d` echo $(basename $file ".exe") " = " $ARTIFACT_PREFIX$date if [ "$(basename $file ".exe")" != "$ARTIFACT_PREFIX$date" ]; then keep=false fi done if [ !$keep ]; then echo "Removing file" rm -f $file fi done done

I like VonC's answer, but just in case, is there a reason you can't rely on the filesystem date and must use the time embedded in the filename? — Blair Conrad
– Blair Conrad, Commented Oct 29, 2008 at 21:30

VonC · Accepted Answer · 2008-10-29 21:28:11Z

7

You mean, something along the line of:

find /path/to/files -name "artifact*" -type f -mtime +7 -exec rm {} \;

?

answered Oct 29, 2008 at 21:28

VonC

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JesperE · Accepted Answer · 2008-10-29 21:28:54Z

2

If you trust the mtime of the file, you can do it in a simple sweep with find:

find "${NIGHTLY_LOCATIONS}" -name $ARTIFACT_PREFIX -type f -mtime +7 -delete

answered Oct 29, 2008 at 21:28

JesperE

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2 Comments

Blair Conrad Over a year ago

Nice. VonC beat you to the punch, but I like -delete over "-exec rm {} \;", which I would've used, since I didn't know about -delete. Thanks!

JesperE Over a year ago

-exec rm might be more portable, though.

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