Removing directory and it's contents with %Y_%b_%d format

Question

I have created a script which should delete the directories and it's contents older then 2 days. The script is working fine but the directory is not getting deleted. Kindly help, it will be much appreciated.

Script details:

export BACKUP_SETS=/backupset/
if [ ! -d "$BACKUP_SETS" ]; then
  # Control will enter here if $DIRECTORY doesn't exist.
  printf "\nFailure when removing BACKUP_SETS, Exiting \n"
  exit 1
 else
        two_days=$(date -d "2 days ago" +%Y_%b_%d)
                for f in $BACKUP_SETS[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]; do
                [ -d "$f" ] || continue
                (( $f < $two_days )) && echo rm -r "$f"
                done
       printf "\n BACKUP_SETS was removed successfully.\n"

fi

The directory contains folder as mentioned below.

[oracle@ backupset]$ ls -lrt
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 2 oracle dba 12288 Jul 23 18:32 2018_Aug_23

Output of the script:

[oracle@ backupset]$ ./backupset.sh

 BACKUP_SETS was removed successfully.

Answer 1

Your $BACKUP_SETS[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9] wildcard does not match your directory name 2018_Aug_23.

You should name your directory 20180823 instead, then it will be seen by your script. Also, named months do not compare correctly (Apr < Mar).

To make the directory name better readable, you could name your directories like 2018-08-23 and use the wildcard $BACKUP_SETS[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9].

Answer 2

As mentioned in a comment, you cannot use < to compare month names:

(( '2018-Aug-29' < '2018-Feb-28' )) && echo 'Uh oh, August is before February' || echo 'Sanity prevails'
Uh oh, August is before February

If you want to compare date strings lexically I would suggest you use YYYY-MM-DD format.

Better though, might be to use find to delete older directories regardless of the naming convention:

find "$BACKUP_SETS" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -mtime +2 -print -exec echo rm -rf {} \;

Needless to say, remove the echo when you want it to run for real.

Answer 3

find "$BACKUP_SETS" -type f -mtime +2 -exec rm {} \;
find "$BACKUP_SETS" -type d -mindepth 1 -mtime +2 -exec rmdir {} \;

The directories will be removed a couple of days later than their latest file.