Delete directories dated Jan, 2010 on Linux

Question

I want to use the following command to delete directories dated Jan 2010 only

ls -lh | awk '{print $6 " " $9}' | sed -n '/Jan/p' | awk '{print $2}' >>/tmp/file_list

The above command will list all directories dated Jan, but I have in my list Jan 2010 and Jan 2011.

Can anyone can help me with the SED command to list only the directories date Jan, 2010?

Answer 1

You can use grep instead of awk/sed, maybe something like this?

ls -lh | grep -o 'Jan [ 1-2][0-9]  2010 .*$' | awk '{print $4}' >> /tmp/file_list

The problem with what you have is the first awk is not including the years, so 2011 (or 2009, 2008, etc) all show up in the list that gets sent to sed.

Answer 2

Never attempt to parse the output of ls for anything other than display purposes --- it is a bad idea.

Though it uses find and xargs instead of sed, maybe something like this would work. Note that it is untested.

jan01="$(date -d '20100101 00:00' +%s)"
feb01="$(date -d '20100201 00:00' +%s)"

today="$(date -d '23:59:59' +%s)"

daysecs="$((24*60*60))" # 86400 

dayssincefeb01="$(((today - feb01) / daysecs ))"
dayssincejan01="$(((today - jan01 + 1) / daysecs ))"

find /path -type d -mtime +"$dayssincefeb01" -mtime -"$dayssincejan01" \
-print0 | xargs -0 rm -r

The find command at the end finds directories that are older than 01 Feb 2010 but younger than 01 Jan 2010 and pipes them safely to xargs using the '\0' null character.