Getting rid of those files
Thursday, March 19th, 2009I've been doing some maintenance of my server, and wanted to do some spring clearning, deleting all spam files inside users' directories. These files are automatically created by spamassassin software. Also, wanted to get rid of Rails production.log files.
Doing everything manually is no fun, and I have to admit, I completely suck at shell scripting.. But if you never try - you'll never learn, so that's what I came up with.
Calculating their size
First, I wanted to find out how much space exactly files called spam inside all directories inside the /home directory take. That's the command which I came up with ( of course, I first had to cd /home ):
[root@me-ja home]# find * -name spam -type f -exec echo {} \; | xargs du -ks | awk '{total += $1} END {print total}'
2952880
A little explanation. I use 3 commands each piping its output to the next one (and the last outputs everything to standard output which is the screen. (more…)
