find-tip

06 Dec 2012 · #find · #hacks · #linux · #shell

I had to figure this out today to automate some log cleanup:

1. find all files in the current directory
2. that are older than 30 days
3. but not in directories DIR1, DIR2 or DIR3
4. print the matching file names
5. and delete them

This is what I came up with:

find . -regextype posix-extended -type f -a -not -regex "^\.\/(DIR1\/|DIR2\/|DIR3\/).*" -a -mtime +30 -exec rm -vf {} \;

I tried doing combinations of -wholepath but it just didn’t work. Further, I didn’t want to use grep to filter out the directories because there’s no corresponding flag in grep to handle the -print0 output from find.