6 thoughts on - CentOS7 Tmpfiles.d Deleted Outdate Files

• Hi all,

  I use CentOS7 and don’t want to use tmpwatch as well as crond.

  I have a question to use `systemd-tmpfiles-clean.service` with my custom configured file in `tmpfiles.d` to delete outdated files periodically in some log dir.

  I have a `tmpfiles.d` configured file in `/etc/tmpfiles.d` named
  `my_log.conf` in following contents.

  “`
  #Type Path Mode UID GID Age Arg r /chenqiang 0775 root root 10s r /chenqiang/test_10s r /chenqiang/test_20s
  “`

  If I run `systemd-tmpfiles –remove` with above configure, all files and dir will be deleted if I set ‘r’ type for the files and dir. but, I want to only delete some outdated files in the dir. and I use
  `systemd-tmpfiles –clean` with following configure.

  “`
  #Type Path Mode UID GID Age Arg d /chenqiang 0775 root root 10s f /chenqiang/test_10s 0660 root root 10s f /chenqiang/test_20s 0660 root root 20s
  “`

  It can delete dir if the age > 10s, but can’t delete the files in it.

  So, would some one help me if I want to delete the outdated files ?

• Would some one help me for this question? thanks very much.

  —
  Best Regards, Chen, Qiang

• I would suggest reading the tmpfiles.d man page.

  Use ‘d’ for the directory, and ‘r’ for the files you want to remove, including the age. Something like ‘r /path/* – – – 10s’.

• The man page for tmpfiles.d says, of the age field:
  “The age field only applies to lines starting with d, D, and x.”

  So, the line:

  d /chenqiang/test_10s 0660 root root 10s

  indicates that systemd-tmpfiles should create the directory
  /chenqiang/test_10s, owned by root/root with mode 0660, and periodically clean it of files and empty directories more than 10s old.

  Note that the default configuration runs systemd-tmpfiles once per day, so specifying time periods much smaller than that may not be useful.

• so, there no method to delete special files that below a directory?

  such as in the directory

  [root@chenqiang]# tree
  .
  ├── test_10d
  └── test_20d

  0 directories, 2 files
  [root@chenqiang]# ll total 8
  -rw-r–r– 1 root root 4 5月 20 19:14 test_10d
  -rw-r–r– 1 root root 4 5月 10 19:15 test_20d

  So, I want to delete file test_20d, keep test_10d, how to do that? thx.

  —
  Best Regards, Chen, Qiang

• Hi Jonathan Billings,

  the `age` can’t apply to ‘r’, only would apply to ‘d’, ‘D’, ‘x’, ‘X’, etc

  “The age field only applies to lines starting with |d|, |D|, |v|, |q|,
  |Q|, |C|, |x| and |X|. If omitted or set to “|-|”, no automatic clean-up is done.”

  so, there have good idea if I only want to delete the specific files not all files in that dir? thx.

  —
  Best Regards, Chen, Qiang