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Do anyone know some good way to delete files on remote server that are older than X days using just SCP/SFTP? Sure I can write some script on perl etc but I feel it's overkill.
Any UNIX way?
Oneliner?
Separate utility?

Thanks

P.S. The task is to delete some outdated backup files.

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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Sure I can write some script on perl etc but it's overkill.

You don't need a script to achieve the intended effect - a one-liner will do if you have shell access to send a command:

ssh user@host 'find /path/to/old_backups/* -mtime +7 -exec rm {} \;'

-mtime +7 matches files created one week ago from midnight of the present day.

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Sad but this is using SSH and remote oneliner. There is no shell access, just SCP/SFTP. – Mike Sep 27 '10 at 10:09
@Mike - Well that one-liner can save you some time over writing a perl script, if that is the case - you could use atime instead of mtime to match the last access time (i.e. when your files were last downloaded) and run a daily cron job. – danlefree Sep 27 '10 at 16:37
there is no shell access to remote machine. – Mike Oct 2 '10 at 11:03
@Mike I was under the impression that you could negotiate adding a cron job with the administrator of the server hosting your backup files - my apologies if this is not possible. – danlefree Oct 3 '10 at 3:43
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up vote 0 down vote

If you insist on SCP/SFTP you can list files, parse them using a simple script and delete old backup files.

Batch mode "-b" switch should help you out. It reads sftp commands from file. http://linux.die.net/man/1/sftp

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Sure it's possible, but I'm looking for more elegant UNIX way if it exists. – Mike Sep 25 '10 at 10:12
Do you have any idea? maybe suggestion from your side would help? Then we can make the idea a bit better? – M_1 Sep 25 '10 at 12:08
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