Periodically deleting old files

spxza

I spotted this cron job on a dev server.

00 20 1 * * /usr/bin/find . -type f -mtime +30 -exec rm -f {} \;

It's meant to remove files older than 30 days once a month in a particular directory. Problem is that it runs as root. Now there are no files in /root/

root@foo:~# ls -l ~
total 10
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root    6 2013-09-01 20:00 libxml/
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root    6 2013-09-01 20:00 libxslt/
drwxrwxrwx  6 1107 1107   53 2013-09-01 20:00 postgresql-8.4.13/
drwxr-xr-x 19 inet 1000 4096 2013-09-01 20:00 unixODBC-2.3.1/
drwxr-xr-x  7  201  201  100 2013-09-01 20:00 vmware-tools-distrib/
root@foo:~# find ~ -type f
/root/.ssh/authorized_keys
/root/.bash_history
/root/.lesshst
root@foo:~#

flabdablet

Could have been worse. The kind of nuff-nuff who would put find . in a crontab is probably just as likely to use find / next time. Hell, they're next to each other on the keyboard so they must mean nearly the same thing, amirite?

snoofle

To be fair, all of the OS files in there probably are more than 30 days old, so works-as-coded...

PleegWat

@flabdablet said:

Could have been worse. The kind of nuff-nuff who would put find . in a crontab is probably just as likely to use find / next time. Hell, they're next to each other on the keyboard so they must mean nearly the same thing, amirite?

Or, slightly more likely, $TMPDIR/. With the / and without setting TMPDIR.

Lawrence

Snoofle is back!

flabdablet

@Lawrence said:

Snoofle is back!

Quick, everybody look busy