Linux Bash – Delete Files from Remote FTP Server Older Than X Days

bashftplinux

i've got a remote FTP server where i store some backups via cronjob.

The Problem is that i only got a little amount of space so im doing incremental backups. I want to keep the backups about 14 days.

I don't have any other access to the server except FTP and i don't now how to delete files older than x days. Every file got a name with a date in it

yxzNamezxy-date-y-m-d.tar.bz2 (datev-20100111.tar.bz2(

Hope to get some help here.

Cheers and thanks for the hopefully coming answeres,

Dennis

/Edit

I'm trying to use the curl thing which is mantioned in an answere with this part of code

curl ftp://$FTP_SERVER --user $FTP_USER:$FTP_PASS --list-only > files.tmp
declare -a aFiles
let iCount=0
exec < files.tmp
while read sLine
do
        aFiles[$iCount]=$sLine
        ((iCount++))
done

echo -e "\n Files: \n\n\n"
echo ${aFiles[@]}

echo -e "\nfor ...\n\n\n"
for sFile in $aFiles
do
        echo -e "\nFile:" $sFile
done

but the secound loop doesn't give me more than 1 filename

Cheers,

Dennis

Best Answer

You could send a series of commands to lftp and wrap it in a shell script which calculates the filename of the too old files (see the script below).

TODAY=$(date --iso)                   # Today's date like YYYY-MM-DD
RMDATE=$(date --iso -d '6 days ago')  # TODAY minus X days - too old files
FTPUSER=username
FTPPW=password                        # Better load this from an encrypted file
FTPSERVER=FQDN_or_IP
LFTP=/usr/bin/lftp                    # Path to binary
TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)                   # Your archives are here

# CAUTION: mput -E deletes local files after upload
echo -n "Uploading files via FTP... "
$LFTP << EOF
open ${FTPUSER}:${FTPPW}@${FTPSERVER}
cd backups/${HOSTNAME}
mkdir ${TODAY}
cd ${TODAY}
mput -E ${TMPDIR}/*
cd ..
rm -rf ${RMDATE}
bye
EOF
echo "Done."

Make sure nobody execpt root can read this script or put the credentials somewhere else. TMPDIR is the directory where the backups reside locally. Of course you need to edit the obivous parts.

HTH,
PEra

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