Question

I had previously used a simple find command to delete tar files not accessed in the last x days (in this example, 3 days):

find /PATH/TO/FILES -type f -name "*.tar" -atime +3 -exec rm {} \;

I now need to improve this script by deleting in order of access date and my bash writing skills are a bit rusty. Here’s what I need it to do:

1. check the size of a directory /PATH/TO/FILES
2. if size in 1) is greater than X size, get a list of the files by access date
3. delete files in order until size is less than X

The benefit here is for cache and backup directories, I will only delete what I need to to keep it within a limit, whereas the simplified method might go over size limit if one day is particularly large. I’m guessing I need to use stat and a bash for loop?

Answer 1

Here’s a simple, easy to read and understand method I came up with to do this:

DIRSIZE=$(du -s /PATH/TO/FILES | awk '{print $1}')
if [ "$DIRSIZE" -gt "$SOMELIMIT" ]
  then
    for f in `ls -rt --time=atime /PATH/TO/FILES/*.tar`; do
    FILESIZE=`stat -c "%s" $f`
    FILESIZE=$(($FILESIZE/1024))

    DIRSIZE=$(($DIRSIZE - $FILESIZE))
    if [ "$DIRSIZE" -lt "$LIMITSIZE" ]; then
        break
    fi
done
fi