Scrubbing local scratch space

Scrubber Design

Imagine a local partition which is quite crowded and needs to be cleaned. Cleaning should be performed based on file age and possibly on a per directory bases (except top level directory). Also, if a user knows a certain part of the data needs to stay there, the scrubber must not delete this data - but may record it for further processing.

Let's start with an example, numbers in parenthesis are file ages in arbitrary units:

/scratch/UserA/ (999)
               fileA (5)
               dirA/ (8)
                    fileB(7)
                    fileC(4)
                    fileD(7)
               dirB/ (3)
               dirC/ (99)
               dirD/ (88)
                    dirE/ (66)
                         .keep (66)
                    dirF/ (66)
                         fileE (66)                

And now imagine we want to delete everything which is older than 6 time units, thus we would like to delete fileB,fileD,dirC,dirF and fileE. dirD and DirE needs to stay because of the .keep file which marks a directory as important.

Test case

Run this script to create above situation under /tmp/testcase, note that it sets both access and modification times into the past and uses "days" as the unit.

-- CarstenAulbert - 03 Jan 2011