I am trying to write a crontab that will clear all of my non-session files out of the /tmp directory every hour: Here is the contents of my crontab file:
17 * * * * /home/<username>/hourly/clear_tmp.sh

Inside of clear_tm.sh I have:
#!/bin/bash
rm -f $(find /tmp -type f | grep -v sess_);

Im a little bit of a newbie with the crontabs, can someone let me know where my problem is? Thanks in advance.

Is your .sh script file executable with a chmod of 755?

What error message do you get?


--
Norm
Opinions are my own views and not the views of DreamHost.
Any advice offered by me should be acted upon at your own risk.

Yes, it is set to 755. I am actually not getting an error message, but I am still seeing files in the tmp directory that are several hours old, indicating that the script isnt working properly.

Are you putting /tmp as in the system tmp or your own user /tmp as in say /home/username/tmp?
The crontab will be looking in the system /tmp folder unless you give the full path.

Later.
Is that just a typo btw in your OP where you left the 'p' off tmp?


--
Norm
Opinions are my own views and not the views of DreamHost.
Any advice offered by me should be acted upon at your own risk.

Edited by norm1037 on 06/18/06 11:59 AM (server time).

Have you run this script manually with any success?

-Scott

Its odd, it seems as though its not working now, but it had been earlier in the week (or at least I wasnt seeing any tmp files doing the same activity that usually creates them). Does anybody whose a better shell scripter than myself see a problem with the script?

I use xargs for operations like this. I use -user so I ignore everybody else's files. I also use full paths since cron doesn't set all your paths. This is how I'd do it:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/find /tmp -user USERNAME -type f | /bin/grep -v sess_ | /usr/bin/xargs /bin/rm -f

-Scott

Thanks Scott, I used that and it works perfectly now, thanks so much for your help.