Managing and Archiving Log Files Using Find and Tar

You could probably write a script and put this in the cron scheduler...  Here is the quick and dirty manual way to do it.

I wanted a way to archive everything in a particular directory and remove files (and only files) in that directory.  I was running out of space on one of my filesystems and I knew "log" files were eating up most of my space.  I still had plenty of space on my /tmp filesystem.  I wanted to get rid of files older than 15 days after I archived them so here is what I did.

I created a place for my archive files.
# mkdir -p /tmp/logs

I then changed directories to the place the log files lived.
# cd /(path to log files)/

I then, as a sanity check, ran this command to make sure it included the files I wanted and excluded those I didn't.
# find . -mtime +15 | xargs ls -l

After I validated this list was the files I wanted to archive, I ran the following command to tar and compress the files.
# find . -mtime +15 | xargs tar cvfz /tmp/logs/111609logs.tar.gz

This will tar up and compress everything older than 15 days.  I named my log file using a date stamp 15 days in the past. Now I want to remove files older than 15 days, but only files, not directories.  I used this command.
# find . -type f -mtime +15 | xargs rm -f

The "find" command will find everything so using the "-type f" option it will only find files.

I was able to free up about 3GB.  I hope this helps others out there.

Copying Directory Structures Between Linux or UNIX Systems

As I build or rebuild servers that need a particular directory structure, I wanted a fast way to replicate or reproduce the empty directory structure with the appropriate owners and permissions.  Historically, I would have used the tar command for this and only selected directories.  There is another, and in my opinion more efficient, way to do this using the cpio command.

I wanted to recreate the following two directory structures (including all sub-directories, which there are many of):
/u02/prn/app
/u02/prn/oradata

On the server you want to model the directory structure(s) after you would run the following commands.
# find /u02/prn/app -type d | cpio -ov >/tmp/appdirs.cpio
# find /u02/prn/oradata -type d | cpio -ov >/tmp/oradatadirs.cpio

Now using "scp" I can copy these files to the server I want to recreate the directory structure on.
# scp /tmp/*.cpio destination_server_here:/tmp/.

Now I will extract the archive which will create the directory structures I want (with the appropriate owners and permissions).  Note:  run this command from the "/" filesystem.  If you run it from /tmp, it will look for u02 in tmp.  It obviously doesn't live there.  So, do it from /
# cpio -iv </tmp/appdirs.cpio
# cpio -iv </tmp/oradatadirs.cpio

Done!  Not quite magic, but almost.

Assumptions:  You have the same users and groups created on the destination server as you do on the source server.

Hope this helps someone out there.