I was just trying to get some backups configured and I wanted a way of deleting files from a directory stucture that were older than a certain date. I couldn't figure out how to do it easier from a Windows 2003 command script, so I wrote a quick C# console app to do the job. I've included the code and a copy in case you find this useful. WARNING: Use this at your own risk, as I wrote this for myself I haven't spent any time putting in "Are You Sure" prompts or anything. If you were to do something crazy like DeleteOldFiles 5 c:\ it will delete any file on your C:\ drive that has not been written to in 5 days - including things in the Windows directory..
Update: The second I posted this, I noticed the ForFiles command in the Windows Server 2003 resource kit that works a bit like find on unix. Hey ho, at least I wrote some C# code today.
The code is below, as you can see there is not a lot to it - but a nice example of recursion.
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
namespace DeleteOldFiles
{
public class DeleteOldFiles
{
private static double fileCount = 0;
static void Main(string[] args)
{
double daysOld;
if (args.Length != 2
|| !double.TryParse(args[0], out daysOld)
|| !Directory.Exists(args[1]))
{
displayUsage();
return;
}
deleteOldFiles(args[1], daysOld);
}
static private void deleteOldFiles(string path, double daysOld)
{
System.Console.WriteLine(
String.Format("Deleting files older than {0} days",
daysOld)
);
deleteOldFiles(path, DateTime.Now.AddDays(-daysOld));
System.Console.WriteLine(
String.Format("{0} files deleted",
fileCount)
);
}
static private void deleteOldFiles (string path, DateTime olderThanDate)
{
DirectoryInfo dirInfo = new DirectoryInfo(path);
FileInfo[] files = dirInfo.GetFiles();
foreach (FileInfo file in files)
{
if (file.LastWriteTime < olderThanDate)
{
System.Console.WriteLine(
String.Format("Delete {0}.",file.FullName)
);
file.IsReadOnly = false;
file.Delete();
fileCount++;
}
}
// Now recurse down the directories
DirectoryInfo[] dirs = dirInfo.GetDirectories();
foreach (DirectoryInfo dir in dirs)
{
deleteOldFiles(dir.FullName, olderThanDate);
}
}
static private void displayUsage()
{
string message = "DeleteOldFiles.\n\n"
+ "Console utility to recursively search a directory and\n"
+ "delete files older than a certain number of days.\n\n"
+ "Usage: DeleteOldFiles daysOld path\n\n"
+ "\tdaysOld\tnumber of days old the file must be over to be deleted\n\n"
+ "\tpath\tlocation on file system that you want to recursively search\n\n";
System.Console.WriteLine(message);
}
}
}
Ah, pity you're not using OS X - you could use Automator at a fraction of the effort, and even use it to create plug-ins to other apps ;-)
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/automator/
Actually, that reminds me of my old job. I'd set up a CVS repository, and one guy on the team was a dimwit, and kept on checking in stuff he shouldn't. He was continually asking me to get rid of it, and it started to p*ss me off. He came over one day after doing the same thing twice in one morning, so I SSHd to the box and went to clear the new directory he'd created, using:
rm -rf /home/cvsroot/project/spanner
unfortunately (and I don't know why I typed the full path in anyway - saved doing a cd I guess) I actually typed:
rm -rf / home/cvsroot/project/spanner
(note the space!)
I realised my mistake when pages of deleted files went flying past my eyes!
Thank you Martin,
Just what I was looking for. I added my logging class and popped it into my code.