find: ‘ls’ terminated by signal 13 error

Question

My Script

log=$HOME/Deleted/$(date)
find $HOME/OldLogFiles/ -type f -mtime -7 -exec ls -latr {} \; -exec echo was deleted on `date` \; -exec rm -f "{}" \;|paste - - >> $log

My goal for the script is to delete files older than x amount of days and then log them to a file and display the filename, date deleted, and how old it was. I keep getting these errors however...

./test.sh: line 3: $log: ambiguous redirect
find: ‘ls’ terminated by signal 13
find: ‘ls’ terminated by signal 13

Anybody have any suggestions?

Can you clarify exactly what you're trying to achieve here? It will help anybody trying to answer your question as well as anybody searching for similar questions. — Andrew Lott, Jun 28 '13 at 14:51
Downvote, because this is a follow-up to http://superuser.com/q/612930/195224 — mpy, Jun 28 '13 at 14:56
@mpy so? What if it is a follow up? Nothing wrong with that, the OP very correctly posted a new question rather than cluttering the comments of their previous question. That is exactly what they should do. There is no reason to downvote, it is a perfectly clear question. — terdon, Jun 28 '13 at 17:00
You're welcome. Just so you know, @mpy is only trying to be a good SU user, I am sure he has nothing against you personally and I have nothing but respect for the quality of his answers. We just disagree on this particular point. — terdon, Jun 28 '13 at 17:26
@terdon: Follow up was probably the wrong word. The answer to the other question had issues. So I thought it would be better to correct the answer in the first place instead of raising a new question on the error of those answer. (And that is what I tried to do with my comment and after acknowledgement by OP with my edit. So, mkrouse, it really has nothing to do with "little guy" -- I helped you, where it IMHO belongs to. — mpy, Jun 28 '13 at 17:39
The -a option of ls is meaningless when applied to file argument(s). (ls –l .bashrc works fine; you don’t need to say ls –la.) And the -t and -r options are meaningful only when you have multiple arguments, or one (or more) directory argument. So, since you’re saying -type f, you might as well say just -exec ls -l {}. — Scott - Слава Україні, Jun 29 '13 at 18:01

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 28 '13 at 17:50

1

First of all, based on your previous question, you want -mtime +7 for 7 days or older. -mtime -7 means 7 days old or newer.

The ambiguous redirect error probably means that $log is not defined. I cannot reproduce your find: ‘ls’ terminated by signal 13 it probably depends on the specific files you have in the folder in question. Could you post the file list somewhere?

Anyway, signal 13 means a broken pipe so something is going wrong. Are you piping this command through head or tail or similar? Try this and see if you get the same errors:

find $HOME/OldLogFiles/  -type f -mtime +7 -exec stat -c "%n %y"  "{}" \; -exec echo was deleted on `date` \; |paste - - >>$log

answered Jun 28 '13 at 17:50

terdon

53,403

1

ambiguous redirection can also be caused by white spaces in $log; try this in bash: log=$(date); echo foo > $log, this failes, while log=$(date); echo foo > "$log" is working fine. – mpy Jun 28 '13 at 22:27
1

Well, putting the pieces together here: if there’s something about $log (such as unescaped, unquoted embedded spaces) that makes >> $log fail, then that means that the paste process never gets started, and so the find is piping into nothing. But find isn’t writing to its standard output; it’s only spawning child processes (ls and echo) that do. (rm also shares the same stdout; i.e., the broken pipe, but it doesn’t write anything to it.) So, each time find fork/execs ls and ls writes, it gets a broken pipe signal. – Scott - Слава Україні Jun 29 '13 at 17:58
The only question is: Why doesn’t echo exhibit the same behavior? I guess it probably has something to do with the fact that echo is a shell builtin command. – Scott - Слава Україні Jun 29 '13 at 17:59

find: ‘ls’ terminated by signal 13 error

1 Answers1