Copy and Delete

Question

Ok, I am new to ubuntu. I have 200,000 files that I need to go through and archive files that have not been updated in 30days.

find . -type f -mtime +30

Done.

Then I need to copy them to a location while keeping their dir structure past the current ./ This is because the file structure is part of the uniqueness of each file. I may have 200 files called sum however FunRun/Sum and Smoke/Sum are two different things.

find . -type f -mtime +30 -exec cp --parents '{}' /home/me/backup \;

Done. But that does not delete them... Well mv is a cp with delete. But MV does not have --parents switch.

So I tried

find . -type f -mtime +30 -exec cp --parents '{}' /home/me/backup \; && rm
for file in 'find . -type f -mtime +30' do sudo cp $file --parents '{}' /home/me/backup \; && sudo rm $file; done

No go. So I was playing with creating a list of files and use it like old school batch files. Problem is the list takes a long time to make and I would like to automate this process. So I searched and tested nothing worked. So either a one-line bash script is a lost cause and will need to write a python script to do it or you guys can help. So I figured I would ask here and see how it goes over the weekend and test on monday.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

Most of what you're doing looks like shotgun debugging attempts—just changing random things without really knowing what they mean. You should really read through a tutorial on find, and maybe one on bash scripting.

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Anyway, you can string together multiple actions on a single find command. Even multiple -exec actions if you want. So:

find . -type f -mtime +30 -exec cp --parents '{}' /home/me/backup \; -exec rm '{}' \;

Or, more simply:

find . -type f -mtime +30 -exec cp --parents '{}' /home/me/backup \; -delete

Or, of course, you could write your own two-line shell script that calls cp --parents with all of its arguments, then calls rm with all but its last argument, and just -exec that.

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If you want to do the for loop, you can do that… although xargs would probably make for sense than doing them one by one, let's try it your way:

• You're not calling find at all; single quotes mark literal strings. If you want to execute a string as a command and get the results, you want backticks. Or, better, $(…).
• A one-liner for loop needs a semicolon before the do.
• You've added sudo, which wasn't in your find commands, so I doubt you want it here either.
• Using $file without quotes is a bad idea if you have any files with, say, spaces in the names.
• The '{}' and \; are going to pass literal {} and ; strings to cp. So, you're asking it to copy $file, {}, and /home/me/backup to ;. That doesn't make any sense. The find command has special uses for those things, but cp doesn't. If you're using '{}' to try to pass the filename, you're already doing that with $file.

So:

for file in $(find . -type f -mtime +30); do cp "$file" --parents /home/me/backup && sudo rm "$file"; done