deleting /tmp files from crontab

[david+dated+ (David Banning)]

I am attempting to delete my .spamassassin files from my /tmp directory

putting a command in my crontab;

find /tmp/.spam* -mmin +360 -delete

renders the following error;

find: -delete: /tmp/.spamassassin10101hXUUVytmp: relative path potentially not safe

looking in past postings on this matter, post people add the -mindepth 1, however in my case while it elliminates the error,
it does not delete all the files, perhaps because some of the .spam* files are directories.

I wonder if someone has a solution for this.

[david+dated+ (David Banning)]

Post by david+dated+ (David Banning)
I am attempting to delete my .spamassassin files from my /tmp directory
putting a command in my crontab;
find /tmp/.spam* -mmin +360 -delete

the find syntax looks strange (assuming this is straight 'find', not
somthing crontab-specific); normally, I'd expect to see
# find /tmp -name '.spam*' -mmin +360 -delete

That seems to delete the files, but not the directories starting in .spam*

Reviewing the find man page, it appears the -delete implementation will
not work unless the directory is empty. Still looking for solutions here.

Does that help?
regards
Michael

Post by david+dated+ (David Banning)
renders the following error;
find: -delete: /tmp/.spamassassin10101hXUUVytmp: relative path potentially
not safe
looking in past postings on this matter, post people add the -mindepth 1,
however in my case while it elliminates the error,
it does not delete all the files, perhaps because some of the .spam*
files are directories.
I wonder if someone has a solution for this.
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Michael Schuster
http://recursiveramblings.wordpress.com/
recursion, n: see recursion

[William A. Mahaffey III]

Post by david+dated+ (David Banning)

Post by david+dated+ (David Banning)
I am attempting to delete my .spamassassin files from my /tmp directory
putting a command in my crontab;
find /tmp/.spam* -mmin +360 -delete

the find syntax looks strange (assuming this is straight 'find', not
somthing crontab-specific); normally, I'd expect to see
# find /tmp -name '.spam*' -mmin +360 -delete

That seems to delete the files, but not the directories starting in .spam*
Reviewing the find man page, it appears the -delete implementation will
not work unless the directory is empty. Still looking for solutions here.

Perhaps a 2nd invocation replacing '-delete' w/ '-exec \rm -rf {} +' ?

[Timo Buhrmester]

Post by david+dated+ (David Banning)

# find /tmp -name '.spam*' -mmin +360 -delete

That seems to delete the files, but not the directories starting in .spam*
Reviewing the find man page, it appears the -delete implementation will
not work unless the directory is empty. Still looking for solutions here.

A common idiom is ``find ... -print0 | xargs -0 rm -r''.
Note that -print0 and xargs -0 aren't POSIX, but I'm not aware of
implementations lacking those.

[Arthur Chance]

Post by david+dated+ (David Banning)

Post by david+dated+ (David Banning)
I am attempting to delete my .spamassassin files from my /tmp directory
putting a command in my crontab;
find /tmp/.spam* -mmin +360 -delete

the find syntax looks strange (assuming this is straight 'find', not
somthing crontab-specific); normally, I'd expect to see
# find /tmp -name '.spam*' -mmin +360 -delete

That seems to delete the files, but not the directories starting in .spam*
Reviewing the find man page, it appears the -delete implementation will
not work unless the directory is empty. Still looking for solutions here.

Take a look at the -d or argument-less -depth primaries. From the man page

-depth Always true; same as the non-portable -d option. Cause find to
perform a depth-first traversal, i.e., directories are visited in
post-order and all entries in a directory will be acted on before
the directory itself.