Webmaster Forum / Perl / Modules / July 2009

At various places around our system we want to clean up files older  
than x, and sometimes prune empty directories. Naturally we have to be  
careful doing this lest we accidentally blow away far too many of the  
wrong files.

I'm thinking about a Perl module and accompanying script with this  
interface:

    cleanup_files.pl  --age=age --dir=dir --name=name [--dry-run] [--
prune-empty-dirs]

where age can be specified as "1h", "2day", etc., and name is a  
required glob pattern, and dir is checked to make sure it is  
sufficiently deep (e.g. can't use /). --dry-run tells you what would  
be deleted. --prune-empty-dirs also causes empty dirs to be pruned.  
The script would report at its end how many files and directories were  
removed.

The idea is to have a convenient, but safe, one-liner to put in a cron  
for each directory that needs periodic cleaning.

In the past we've done the old "find ... | xargs rm -f", but it  
doesn't have the safety checks, directory pruning, or reporting.

Does anyone else think this is (mildly) valuable? Am I reinventing the  
wheel, in terms of Perl libraries or other Unix utilities besides  
basic find?

Thanks
Jon