20 Mar
2002
20 Mar
'02
9:07 p.m.
On Mar 20, 18:05, Gunther Schadow wrote:
Hihi, our little training in risk-assessment tonight
is the following
sippet of a crontab entry, scheduled to run dayly around midnight:
(cd /usr/preserve ; find . -mtime +7 -a -exec rm -f {} \;)
why is this a bad idea and what happened to me last night as I was
playing with my VAX6460?
Because Bad Things happen if the cd fails...
Answer: the /usr/preserve was a symlink to
/usr/var/preserve which
didn't exist. What happened next?
All files that were not accessed for more than 7 days
were being deleted
The correct way to do someting like this in a cron entry is to check the
return code from the cd command, and only execute the rest of the command
if the cd succeeds, eg
(cd /usr/preserve && find . -mtime +7 -a -exec rm -f {} \;)
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
20 Mar
20 Mar
11:47 p.m.
Pete Turnbull wrote:
The correct way to do someting like this in a cron
entry is to check the
return code from the cd command, and only execute the rest of the command
if the cd succeeds, eg
(cd /usr/preserve && find . -mtime +7 -a -exec rm -f {} \;)
Hm. I'm not a Unix guru, so it's well possible I'm missing something
here. Perhaps you can enlighten me.
Why don't you just
find /usr/preserve -mtime +7 -a -exec rm -f {} \;
- is it just because you wouldn't have the ;) at the end of the line
then? ;-)
(With "my" VMS, I'd do a DEL/BEF="-7-" tempdisk:[tempdir...]*.*.*
- and
the above find appears to me like the proper translation.)
--
Andreas Freiherr
Vishay Semiconductor GmbH, Heilbronn, Germany
http://www.vishay.com
21 Mar
21 Mar
2:36 p.m.
Or perhaps a better solution:
find /usr/preserve -mtime +7 -a -exec rm -f {} \;
On Thu, 21 Mar 2002, Pete Turnbull wrote:
On Mar 20, 18:05, Gunther Schadow wrote:
Hihi, our little training in risk-assessment
tonight is the following
sippet of a crontab entry, scheduled to run dayly around midnight:
(cd /usr/preserve ; find . -mtime +7 -a -exec rm -f {} \;)
why is this a bad idea and what happened to me last night as I was
playing with my VAX6460?
Because Bad Things happen if the cd fails...
Answer: the /usr/preserve was a symlink to
/usr/var/preserve which
didn't exist. What happened next?
All files that were not accessed for more than 7
days were being deleted
The correct way to do someting like this in a cron entry is to check the
return code from the cd command, and only execute the rest of the command
if the cd succeeds, eg
(cd /usr/preserve && find . -mtime +7 -a -exec rm -f {} \;)
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
8160
days inactive
8160
days old
2 comments
3 participants
participants (3)
-
Andreas.Freiherr＠Vishay.com -
pete＠dunnington.u-net.com -
vaxman＠earthlink.net