bash script improvement needed loops through dirs 12 hours old, deletes symbolic link inside and deletes dir

Question

I've totally hacked together this script and I hope to get some corrections, or some insight into a much simpler version which I know is possible...

I want to loop through a named dir and check each subdir if it contains any subdirs that are X minutes old, and if so delete the old subdir. Each eligible subdir will only contain 1 symbolic link.

For this structure /var/www/flash/avmin/{$usr_id}/{$timestamp}/{->symlink}

I want to preserve /{$usr_id} but delete all /{$timestamp} if +12 hours old, and I assume this means I need to empty it before deleting it.

Because it is likely that /{$usr_id} will be created in the same server instance when $timestamp and the symlink are created, I must loop through each /{$usr_id} subdir and test conditions from there.

I will make this script run every 12 hours with Cron running as root, therefore within one 24 hour period all symlinks will be assured to be clean.

Note there may be several {$timestamp} subdirs in ../{$usr_id}, but each subdir will contain only 1 symlink and nothing else.

I sense this could be one or two lines of code without the for...in and simply using find inside avmin using (-maxdepth 2) and a time condition of X hours (or X mins) right???

#!/bin/bash

for i in /var/www/flash/avmin/*
do
    cd "$i"
    for xdir in "$i"
    do
        if [ "$xdir" type d -cmin +60 ]; then
            find . -maxdepth 2 -type L -cmin +60 -exec rm {} \
        "$xdir" -type d -cmin +60 -exec rm {}
    fi
        done
done
exit

I saw a "similar question" which has given me an idea here

Answer 1

I am not sure at all I'm answering the right question (please edit your question to clearly state what you need to be done, as right now the example script is making little sense...]

What I guessed so far:

1) you want to look, for every dirs 1 level underneath /var/www/flash/avmin/*/ , only those directories older than 60 minutes

2) then you want, inside those dirs, to delete all links older than 60 minutes?

With these guesses:

#!/bin/bash

export NBMIN=60

#find all subdirs jsut underneath each /var/www/flash/avmin/*/ that are $NBMIN minutes old
for xdir in $(find /var/www/flash/avmin -type d -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 2 -cmin +${NBMIN} ) 
do
   #for those dirs, delete symlinks "just underneath", that are older than $NBMIN minutes
   find "$xdir" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type L -cmin +${NBMIN} -exec echo rm '{}' \;
   #and then if there is nothing else in that dir, delete it:
   command rmdir "$xdir" #without -f and -r... will only remove "$i" directory if it's empty!
done

Of course this will only work if every dirs & files are just "normal" names (ie, do not contain spaces, and other weird characters like "newline" or others)... Stephane will probably pop up an answer with Zsh "**/" niceties ;)

I'm not sure that is what you want (and please test it... and only remove the "echo" (so "echo rm" becomes "rm") once you are 100% sure that it only lists the files you wanted to see gone ! (for example, I'm not sure you only want to look inside directories older than 60mn ?)