[UCLA-LUG] Bash Script / find -ctime help, please

[Charles Harvey]

Thanks for the explanation, it clarifies alot!

Charles Harvey
Three Moons Network
http://threemoonsnetwork.net
419-818-5260 

|>| -----Original Message-----
|>| From: linux-admin@linux.ucla.edu [mailto:linux-admin@linux.ucla.edu]On
|>| Behalf Of Leonard R. Wayne
|>| Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2000 9:10 AM
|>| To: linux@linux.ucla.edu
|>| Subject: Re: [UCLA-LUG] Bash Script / find -ctime help, please
|>| 
|>| 
|>| > find -maxdepth 1 -type f \( -ctime +60 -o \! \( -name \*.jpg 
|>| -o \) \) -exec rm -f \{\} \;
|>| 
|>| You might be looking at the wrong man page.
|>| To understand the '-o' parameter, look at
|>| the man page for 'find.'  (On my computer,
|>| which is running Red Hat 6.1, the man page
|>| describes '-o' very close to the end of the
|>| man page, in the section titled 'OPERATORS').
|>| 
|>| I suspect the '!' character means 'not'.
|>| In other words, '! true' would mean 'not 
|>| true.'
|>| 
|>| The \'s mean "don't interpret the next
|>| character as a special shell character."  
|>| For example, '*' is a special character,
|>| interpreted by the shell.  It causes all
|>| matching filenames to be inserted into the
|>| command line before the command is actually
|>| passed to 'find.'  But the way 'find' works,
|>| you don't want to do that.  You just want
|>| to pass the character '*' to the 'find'
|>| command.  So you put a '\' in front of it
|>| to make sure the shell does not interpret
|>| the character for you.  This applies 
|>| similarly to the characters: ( ) { } ! ;
|>| 
|>| I didn't explain that very well.  My favorite
|>| book for this kind of stuff is Harley Hahn's
|>| 'A Student's Guide to UNIX.'  However, I 
|>| think that book deals more with C-shell than
|>| Bash, which you said you are working with.
|>| (There is a lot of overlap, of course.)
|>| Maybe somebody can recommend a good book on
|>| Bash?
|>| 
|>| - Len
|>| 
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