Re: Script to delete only those files on a path whose accessed date is more than 7 days

[Athanasius]

Hello abhi_perl, and welcome to the Monastery!

Your script is OK (apart from the absence of use strict, of course!). The problem seems to be a — well, shall we say, an eccentricity — of Windows: a file access does not (by default) change the “date accessed” attribute of the file.

A Google search on “ Windows "date accessed" ” brought up this link: http://www.vistaheads.com/forums/microsoft-public-windows-vista-file-management/176698-date-accessed-attribute-not-updating.html. Following the advice there — i.e., changing one registry setting and rebooting — fixed the problem on my system. With this change, your script should work as expected.

A tip: in situations like this, put in print statements to find out what Perl is actually seeing. I used:

    foreach my $file (@files)
    {
        printf "-A %s = %d\n", $file, -A "$userpath/$file"; 
        printf "-M %s = %d\n", $file, -M "$userpath/$file"; 
    }

from which it was obvious that the “access date” attribute was mostly the same as the “modified date” attribute. This was easily confirmed via Windows Explorer.

HTH,

[abhi_perl]

Hi Athanasius

Thanks for your note. But I am not using Windows Vista. I am working on Windows 9. Also, I tested the script on mac OS also but still the script seems going somewhere wrong. Can you please suggest if there is any other alternative to delete the files whose accessed dates are last 7 days. I need to have this script running on both OS

Thanks

Abhishek