Unix Find and Remove Python Style

No doubt the Unix find and remove command comes in very useful when cleaning up large folders. However find can quickly bump into the old “/usr/bin/find: Argument list too long” problem.

For reference here is a command that works well. Except of course when too many files or directories involved.

There is of course other ways to get this done with find, but I like python so I resorted to python as the example show below.

Here is an example that worked for me:

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#!/usr/bin/env python
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##  Adjust the humandays variable.  Set to 2000 days until we feel more comfortable.
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import os
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import glob
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import time
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import shutil
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humandays = 2000
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computerdays = 86400*humandays
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now = time.time()
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inputDirs = glob.glob('/usr/local/forms/*/input')
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print "Script running on %s " % time.ctime(now)
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print "using physical path /usr/local/forms/*/input and only removing directories older than %s days." % (humandays)
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for inputDir in inputDirs:
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  for r,d,f in os.walk(inputDir):
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    for dir in d:
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         timestamp = os.path.getmtime(os.path.join(r,dir))
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         if now-computerdays > timestamp:
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             try:
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      print "modified: %s" % time.ctime(timestamp),
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      removeDir=os.path.join(r,dir)
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                  print "  remove ",removeDir,
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                  ## Better be 100% sure before you uncomment the rmtree line!
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                  ## shutil.rmtree(removeDir)
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                  ## Better be 100% sure before you uncomment the rmtree line!
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             except Exception,e:
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                  print e
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                  pass
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             else:
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                  print " -> success"