Hi

Probably an easy one. I'm backing up some dabatase files on my AIX to a
new directory each night but i only want to keep seven days worth of
backups at a time. What's the best way in a script to find which
directory is the oldest of the seven so I can then delete it?

Thanks
Simmo

chorozon@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi
>
> Probably an easy one. I'm backing up some dabatase files on my AIX to a
> new directory each night but i only want to keep seven days worth of
> backups at a time. What's the best way in a script to find which
> directory is the oldest of the seven so I can then delete it?

Read the man page for "ls"

chorozon@gmail.com wrote:
> Probably an easy one. I'm backing up some dabatase files on my AIX to a
> new directory each night but i only want to keep seven days worth of
> backups at a time. What's the best way in a script to find which
> directory is the oldest of the seven so I can then delete it?

Use 'find' with '-(a|c|m)time' and '-exec rm -r {} \;' flags.
Read here for more information:
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infoce...cmds2/find.htm

Regards,

Frank

chorozon@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi
>
> Probably an easy one. I'm backing up some dabatase files on my AIX to a
> new directory each night but i only want to keep seven days worth of
> backups at a time. What's the best way in a script to find which
> directory is the oldest of the seven so I can then delete it?
>
> Thanks
> Simmo

Although find will work, it will also traverse recursively. I am
assuming you have a directory tree similar to the following:

/db_backup/backupDir1
/db_backup/backupDir2
/db_backup/backupDir3
/db_backup/backupDir4
/db_backup/backupDir5
/db_backup/backupDir6
/db_backup/backupDir7

If so, you can determine the oldest as follows:

ls -t /db_backup | tail -n1

J.