CRON job to delete old files

[kevinsequeira]

Hi,
my php script creates temp files in a folder. how do i set up a cron job that periodically deletes files older that 1 day.
im not sure about the command to delete files older than 1 day in Linux.
thanks for your help

reg
kevin

[stolzyboy]

you can get the modified time from [man]filemtime[/man], then unlink the ones that are older than 1 day using [man]date[/man] or whatever

[kevinsequeira]

thanks for the reply stolzboy, i was thinking more in terms of a direct linux command.
not using CRON to run a PHP script.

reg
keivn

[stolzyboy]

try this, it worked for me

find /yourdir/tmp -mtime +1 -exec rm {} \; //where 1 is number of days since it was modified

[kevinsequeira]

thanks, it worked
reg
kevin

[maestrosdelweb]

Thanks for the tip.. I was also looking for this.

Best regards.

[cbj4074]

I know this thread is like a billion years old, and I know f-all about cron or UNIX shell commands for the most part, but I'm assuming that

find /yourdir/tmp -mtime +1 -exec rm {} \;

won't work on directories, too.

Is there a way to recursively delete all directories, subdirectories, and files in this fashion?

Thanks for any help. It is MUCH appreciated.

[stolzyboy]

no, that doesn't work on directories, you can find the modified time of a directory tho, check out www.php.net/filemtime

you can delete recursively with this

function mostRecentModifiedFileTime($dirName,$doRecursive) {
   $d = dir($dirName);
   $lastModified = 0;
   while($entry = $d->read()) {
       if ($entry != "." && $entry != "..") {
           if (!is_dir($dirName."/".$entry)) {
               $currentModified = filemtime($dirName."/".$entry);
           } else if ($doRecursive && is_dir($dirName."/".$entry)) {
               $currentModified = mostRecentModifiedFileTime($dirName."/".$entry,true);
           }
           if ($currentModified > $lastModified){
               $lastModified = $currentModified;
           }
       }
   }
   $d->close();
   return $lastModified;
}

[cbj4074]

Cool, thanks for the reply!

I guess my only outstanding question would be, "How can I run such a script automatically and at a specified interval?"

What's the best-practice/standard way to do this? Use cron to execute the script using the command-line version of PHP?

Thanks again =)

[neorunner]

find /yourdir/tmp -mtime +1 -exec rm {} \; //where 1 is number of days since it was modified

Is there a way to make it delete a specific file in the directory every hour? I would rather not run a php script to do this.

Lets say I wanted to delete
/yourdir/tmp/temp.txt every hour. Is there a way to do it?

[8ta8ta]

Hi, You can run a php script as a shell script to delete files(dirs) every hours!

Here is a part of my script:

#!/usr/local/php511/bin/php
<?php
function your_functions()
	// check and delete files
}

function run_self()     {
        your_functions();
        sleep(3600);
        run_self();
}

run_self();

?>

Save the script as a shell script like : delete_tmp_files.sh

chmod +x delete_tmp_files.sh

Run it:
./delete_tmp_files.sh &

It works for me, and only use a little CPU resource!

[stadskle]

stolzyboy wrote:

find /yourdir/tmp -mtime +1 -exec rm {} \; //where 1 is number of days since it was modified

Excellent. Almost what I needed. Can I alter this command so that it doesn'n delete index.html ?

[bert56]

Hello,

I'm totally new to PHP and don't know what I'm doing wrong!

Tried running:
find /yourdir/tmp -mtime +1 -exec rm {} \;
in a php file but I am getting an error.

I made an text file and named it dtf.php and dropped it in an directory called dtf. When I executed the file I want that it deletes files in the directory tmp which is located in de directory jcms. Doing this I get an Parse Error.

<?php
find /jcms/tmp -mtime +1 -exec rm {} \;
?>

Bert

[stolzyboy]

you need to look into using www.php.net/exec if you want to run a command with php