How to delete the folder contents using Ruby?

ruby-talk
1

Hi,

Suppose I have an Excel sheet, which has the some numbers say:

    77787
    45877
    78985 so on...

Now I have an directory called as "D://Filehosting" in windows 7
machine. under that directory I have some 500 folders, each of them
having 120 files in it. Now I want to delete the contents of each folder
which which are 2 months older from the current date. Now the folders
are arranged something like below:

    D://Filehosting/Document77787
    D://Filehosting/Document45877 .. so on

Script should take the numbers as mentioned above, and accordingly find
the right directory and accordingly delete the contents.Must check if
the if the folder exists or not before content deletion approach.

what I have is only the Request number and the base directory
Filehosting. then how would I make Document77787 so on.. on the fly?

Can it be done using Ruby?

···

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2

this deletes a file

require "fileutils"
FileUtils.rm_r(s)

this deletes all files in a given dir
Dir["Filehosting/*"].each {|s| FileUtils.rm_r(s)}

···

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3

Probably. I can't help you with reading the numbers from the Excel
sheet but assuming you have those numbers in an Array or Set you could
do something like this:

require 'pathname'
require 'fileutils'

DELTA = 2 * 30 * 24 * 60 * 60

base = Pathname "D:/Filehosting"
limit = Time.now - DELTA

numbers.each do |num|
  dir = base + "Document#{num}"

  next unless dir.directory?

  newest = dir.mtime

  dir.find do |file|
    newest = [newest, file.mtime].max
  end

  FileUtils.rm_rf dir if newest < limit
end

Cheers

robert

···

On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 10:01 AM, Arup Rakshit <lists@ruby-forum.com> wrote:

Hi,

Suppose I have an Excel sheet, which has the some numbers say:

    77787
    45877
    78985 so on...

Now I have an directory called as "D://Filehosting" in windows 7
machine. under that directory I have some 500 folders, each of them
having 120 files in it. Now I want to delete the contents of each folder
which which are 2 months older from the current date. Now the folders
are arranged something like below:

    D://Filehosting/Document77787
    D://Filehosting/Document45877 .. so on

Script should take the numbers as mentioned above, and accordingly find
the right directory and accordingly delete the contents.Must check if
the if the folder exists or not before content deletion approach.

what I have is only the Request number and the base directory
Filehosting. then how would I make Document77787 so on.. on the fly?

Can it be done using Ruby?

--
remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end
http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/

4

#{} inside "" is for automatic interpolaration ...
like "a#{1+2}b" is automatic coverted into "a3b"

···

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5

PS: You can as well ignore the Excel and read directories from the file system:

Pathname.glob(base + "Document*").each do |dir|
...
end

Kind regards

robert

···

On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 10:19 AM, Robert Klemme <shortcutter@googlemail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 10:01 AM, Arup Rakshit <lists@ruby-forum.com> wrote:

Hi,

Suppose I have an Excel sheet, which has the some numbers say:

    77787
    45877
    78985 so on...

Now I have an directory called as "D://Filehosting" in windows 7
machine. under that directory I have some 500 folders, each of them
having 120 files in it. Now I want to delete the contents of each folder
which which are 2 months older from the current date. Now the folders
are arranged something like below:

    D://Filehosting/Document77787
    D://Filehosting/Document45877 .. so on

Script should take the numbers as mentioned above, and accordingly find
the right directory and accordingly delete the contents.Must check if
the if the folder exists or not before content deletion approach.

what I have is only the Request number and the base directory
Filehosting. then how would I make Document77787 so on.. on the fly?

Can it be done using Ruby?

Probably. I can't help you with reading the numbers from the Excel
sheet but assuming you have those numbers in an Array or Set you could
do something like this:

require 'pathname'
require 'fileutils'

DELTA = 2 * 30 * 24 * 60 * 60

base = Pathname "D:/Filehosting"
limit = Time.now - DELTA

numbers.each do |num|
  dir = base + "Document#{num}"

  next unless dir.directory?

  newest = dir.mtime

  dir.find do |file|
    newest = [newest, file.mtime].max
  end

  FileUtils.rm_rf dir if newest < limit
end

--
remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end
http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/

6

Robert Klemme wrote in post #1091710:

···

On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 10:01 AM, Arup Rakshit <lists@ruby-forum.com> > wrote:

numbers.each do |num|
  dir = base + "Document#{num}"

  next unless dir.directory?

  newest = dir.mtime

  dir.find do |file|
    newest = [newest, file.mtime].max
  end

  FileUtils.rm_rf dir if newest < limit
end

Cheers
robert

Thanks Robert for your help! Now what such "#" operator is doing? Could
you just guide me? Any other package which can do the same instead of
"stdlib", would you refer? I would like to read file system module of
Ruby.

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7

Hans Mackowiak wrote in post #1091722:

#{} inside "" is for automatic interpolaration ...
like "a#{1+2}b" is automatic coverted into "a3b"

Thanks Hans for your clarifications!

so for "Document#{num}" if num is 1234 then the sysntax will give me the
Document#1234 => Document1234

Perfect!

···

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