Move files that are 30 minutes old

linux bash shell ubuntu csh
saurabh picture saurabh · May 24, 2016 · Viewed 7.4k times · Source

I work on a server system that does not allow me to store files more than 50 gigabytes. My application takes 20 minutes to generate a file. Is there any way whereby I can move all the files that are more than 30 minutes old from source to destination? I tried rsync: 

rsync -avP source/folder/ user@destiantionIp:dest/folder

but this does not remove the files from my server and hence the storage limit fails.

Secondly, if I use the mv command, the files that are still getting generated also move to the destination folder and the program fails.

Answer

Inian picture Inian · May 24, 2016

You can use find along with -exec for this:-

Replace /sourcedirectory and /destination/directory/ with the source and target paths as you need.

find /sourcedirectory -maxdepth 1 -mmin -30 -type f -exec mv "{}" /destination/directory/ \;

What basically the command does is, it tries to find files in the current folder -maxdepth 1 that were last modified 30 mins ago -mmin -30 and move them to the target directory specified. If you want to use the time the file was last accessed use -amin -30.

Or if you want to find files modified within a range you can use something like -mmin 30 -mmin -35 which will get you the files modified more than 30 but less than 35 minutes ago.

References from the man page:-

   -amin n
          File was last accessed n minutes ago.

   -atime n
          File was last accessed n*24 hours ago.  When find figures out how many 24-hour periods ago the file was last accessed, any fractional part is ignored, so  to  match  -atime
          +1, a file has to have been accessed at least two days ago.

   -mmin n
          File's data was last modified n minutes ago.

   -mtime n
          File's data was last modified n*24 hours ago.  See the comments for -atime to understand how rounding affects the interpretation of file modification times.

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