Unix find remove python style

wordpress meta

title: 'Unix Find and Remove Python Style'
date: '2012-11-26T21:07:06-06:00'
status: publish
permalink: /unix-find-remove-python-style
author: admin
excerpt: ''
type: post
id: 130
category:
    - Bash
    - Python
tag: []
post_format: []

No doubt the Unix find and remove command comes in very useful when cleaning up large folders. However find can quickly bump into the old "/usr/bin/find: Argument list too long" problem.

For reference here is a command that works well. Except of course when too many files or directories involved.

find /usr/local/forms/*/output -name "*.html" -mtime +4 -exec rm {} \;

There is of course other ways to get this done with find, but I like python so I resorted to python as the example show below.

Here is an example that worked for me:

#!/usr/bin/env python
##  Adjust the humandays variable.  Set to 2000 days until we feel more comfortable.

import os
import glob
import time
import shutil

humandays = 2000
computerdays = 86400*humandays
now = time.time()
inputDirs = glob.glob('/usr/local/forms/*/input')

print "Script running on %s " % time.ctime(now)
print "using physical path /usr/local/forms/*/input and only removing directories older than %s days." % (humandays)

for inputDir in inputDirs:
  for r,d,f in os.walk(inputDir):
    for dir in d:
         timestamp = os.path.getmtime(os.path.join(r,dir))
         if now-computerdays > timestamp:
             try:
          print "modified: %s" % time.ctime(timestamp),
          removeDir=os.path.join(r,dir)
                  print "  remove ",removeDir,
                  ## Better be 100% sure before you uncomment the rmtree line!
                  ## shutil.rmtree(removeDir)
                  ## Better be 100% sure before you uncomment the rmtree line!
             except Exception,e:
                  print e
                  pass
             else:
                  print " -> success"