Question

I am trying to remove all empty files that are older than 2 days. Also I am ignoring hidden files, starting with dot. I am doing it with this code:

find /u01/ -type f -size 0 -print -mtime +2 | grep -v "/\\." | xargs rm

It works fine until there are spaces in the name of the file. How could I make my code ignore them?

OS is Solaris.

Answer 1

Option 1

Install GNU find and GNU xargs in an appropriate location (not /usr/bin) and use:

find /u01/ -type f -size 0 -mtime +2 -name '[!.]*' -print0 | xargs -0 rm

(Note that I removed (what I think is) a stray -print from your find options. The options shown removes empty files modified more than 2 days ago where the name does not start with a ., which is the condition that your original grep seemed to deal with.)

Option 2

The problem is primarily that xargs is defined to split its input at spaces. An alternative is to write your own xargs surrogate that behaves sensibly with spaces in names; I’ve done that. You then only run into problems if the file names contain newlines — which the file system allows. Using a NUL ('\0') terminator is guaranteed safe; it is the only character that can’t appear in a path name (which is why GNU chose to use it with -print0 etc).

Option 3

A final better option is perhaps:

find /u01/ -type f -size 0 -mtime +2 -name '[!.]*' -exec rm {} \;

This avoids using xargs at all and handles all file names (path names) correctly — at the cost of executing rm once for each file found. That’s not too painful if you’re only dealing with a few files on each run.

POSIX 2008 introduces the notation + in place of the \; and then behaves rather like xargs, collecting as many arguments as will conveniently fit in the space it allocates for the command line before running the command:

find /u01/ -type f -size 0 -mtime +2 -name '[!.]*' -exec rm {} +

The versions of Solaris I’ve worked on do not support that notation, but I know I work on antique versions of Solaris. GNU find does support the + marker and therefore renders the -print0 and xargs -0 workaround unnecessary.