How to Compress Old Log Files into Single Zip on Linux

findgzipshelltar

I have a folder /home/testuser/log which contain log files of one day old *.log. I wish to compress all the log files older than one day to a single zip(gzip or tar.gz) and delete the older files.

I tried to pipeline find and tar commands but didn't work

Best Answer

Create tar.gz files older than one day logs

find /home/testuser/log/ -mtime +1 | xargs  tar -czvPf  /opt/older_log_$(date +%F).tar.gz

Delete older files [ Note:- if below find output is Correct then remove echo , after that it will delete those files]

find /home/testuser/ -mtime +1 | xargs  -n1 echo rm

Related Solutions

Create an archive with command “gzip”

Gzip works only with a single file, or a stream - data piped to gzip. So you first need to generate one file, like with tar, and then you could gzip that. The other option is to gzip all individual files, and then tar that into one file.

Both these solutions are stupid and should not be used. You should use tar with the built in compression option and do it all in one command.

Grep – How to Grep Word Within a File and Copy the File

Try:

grep -rl --null --include '*.txt' LINUX/UNIX . | xargs -0r cp -t /path/to/dest

Because this command uses NUL-separation, it is safe for all file names including those with difficult names that include blanks, tabs, or even newlines.

The above requires GNU cp. For MacOS/FreeBSD, try:

grep -rl --null --include '*.txt' LINUX/UNIX . | xargs -0 sh -c 'cp "$@" /path/to/dest' sh

How it works:

grep options and arguments
- -r tells grep to search recursively through the directory structure. (On FreeBSD, -r will follow symlinks into directories. This is not true of either OS/X or recent versions of GNU grep.)
- --include '*.txt' tells grep to only return files whose names match the glob *.txt (including hidden ones like .foo.txt or .txt).
- -l tells grep to only return the names of matching files, not the match itself.
- --null tells grep to use NUL characters to separate the file names. (--null is supported by grep under GNU/Linux, MacOS and FreeBSD but not OpenBSD.)
- LINUX/UNIX tells grep to look only for files whose contents include the regex LINUX/UNIX
- . search in the current directory. You can omit it in recent versions of GNU grep, but then you'd need to pass a -- option terminator to cp to guard against file names that start with -.
xargs options and arguments
- -0 tells xargs to expect NUL-separated input.
- -r tells xargs not to run the command unless at least one file was found. (This option is not needed on either BSD or OSX and is not compatible with OSX's xargs.)
- cp -t /path/to/dest copies the directories to the target directory. (-t requires GNU cp.)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Create an archive with command “gzip”

Grep – How to Grep Word Within a File and Copy the File

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