On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 10:39 AM, Matt <lm7812 at gmail.com> wrote: > I want to remove files but only if they are owned by a certain user and group. > > Basically I have this: > > find /var/spool/greylist -mmin +363 -exec rm -f {} \; > > I want to make sure it only deletes files owned by mail. Basically no > matter what weird characters are in the file names I want to make sure > it does not delete anything outside of /var/spool/greylist. I can add > 'sudo -u' to it but then my secure log gets filled with entries but > perhaps thats the only way to do it. > > Matt I don't see anything in that find statement that selects the user and group combination you say you are looking for. I think you are looking for the -user and -group options. Also, if you want to see what it's going to do beforehand, don't go into it blind and use the -print option instead of the -exec. Once you know that -print only prints the files you want to delete, then you can switch -print to -exec. find /var/spool/greylist -user joe -group devs -print However, if you have files with spaces or other special characters in the name, you will need to quote the {}, or the better thing to do is to use xargs with null delimiters, like so: find /var/spool/greylist -user joe -group devs -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f If you need to use sudo, you can put the sudo in the xargs, and it will only get called every so often, instead of once per file: find /var/spool/greylist -user joe -group devs -print0 | sudo xargs -0 rm -f