2007 May 08 - Tue

Removing lots of files

If I don't have a clean up program running, sometimes autocollected files tend to accumulated. For example, netflow processing on 5 minute intervals can accumulate a large number of files. An 'rm' with a partical wild card seems to complain.

I've resorted to a chaining some command line utilities to come up with a quick script to remove files:

ls -1 | grep ft-v05.2007-0[123] | sed 's/^/rm /' > t.sh

This generates a one column directory listing and puts it through grep. Grep looks for a few specific months of files and passes the list onto sed. Sed preappends the removal command onto each file name. The whole shooting match is thrown into a shell script.

Either set execute privileges on the script:

chmod 500 t.sh

Or run with with the shell command:

bash t.sh