Cleaning Up Unwanted Files in Linux

One of my grad students just went to remove some unwanted, automatically created files in his directory and accidentally deleted some things he wanted. I use a script to do clean ups to prevent these kinds of silly errors (which we’re all prone to). Here’s the script:

#!/bin/bash

if [ ! -e $HOME/.rmd ]
then mkdir $HOME/.rmd
fi

find $HOME  \( -name '.rmd' -prune \) -o \
  \( -name '*~' \
     -o -name ',*' \
     -o -name '#*#' \
     -o -name '*.bak'\
     -o -name '*.backup' -atime +5\
     -o -name 'core'\
  \) \
  -print -exec mv -f {} $HOME/.rmd \;

find $HOME/.rmd -atime +5 -exec rm -f {} \;

The script creates a directory called .rmd if it doesn’t exist, finds files matching a certain set of patterns to that directory, and finally removes things in that directory that were moved there more than five days ago. It’s not perfect—files with the same name are just moved over the top of each other.

I name it “clean” and put it in my personal bin directory. You might add or delete individual line items depending on what kinds of files your programs create. When I was a grad student, disks were expensive, and worked on a system that enforced quotas, I ran it in a cronjob once a day. Now I just run it whenever things look ugly—the same approach I have to dusting.

Building or modifying a script like this can be dangerous since a bug could cause things you care about to be systematically removed. I recommend testing it on an account that doesn’t have anything you care about in it before you blindly trust it.

One last thing: I used Linux in the title, but this will obviously work in anything with bash and find including varieties of Unix and OS X. These days I’m running it on OS X rather than Ultrix or 4.3BSD. Not all versions of find have a “prune” option.

Posted by windley on April 4, 2007 10:41 AM