CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashawk
Parmaia
Parmaia

Reputation: 1172

How to delete files older than x seconds (not days, hours or minutes) on shell?

There are many questions on how to delete files older than x minutes/hours/days on linux, but no one get to the seconds resolution.

I've found this solution:

for file in `ls -ltr --time-style=+%s | awk '{now=systime(); del_time=now-30; if($6<del_time && $5=="0") print $7}'` ;do
   rm -f $file >/dev/null 2>&1
done

But systime() is not present on awk

"function systime never defined"

but is on gawk which I couldn't install on Ubuntu 13.xx (and really don't whant to install any extra software).

Upvotes: 8

Views: 5538

Answers (2)

Parmaia
Parmaia

Reputation: 1172

A solution I found is to replace systime() command, and use date +%s like this:

for file in $(ls -ltr --time-style=+%s | awk '{cmd="date +%s"; cmd|getline now; close(cmd);del_time=now-30; if($6<del_time) print $7}') ;do
   rm -f $file >/dev/null 2>&1
done

The trick is to capture the output of date +%s inside awk and using cmd="date +%s"; cmd|getline now; close(cmd) was the only (really the first) way that I've found.

Edit: I changed backticks to parentheses, as recomended by @Jotne

Upvotes: -1

Dmitry Alexandrov
Dmitry Alexandrov

Reputation: 1773

Parsing output of ls is always a bad approach. Especially when find from GNU Findutils is able to do all the work by itself:

$ find -not -newermt '-30 seconds' -delete

Upvotes: 18

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