Im using Scrup in conjunction with its nifty little partner recv, a hungry hungry php script, to automatically upload screenshots from my macbook to my home server. A setup like this is super neat when discussing any screen related things, especially over the phone. Fact is I find it so useful that I started thinking about eventually cleaning up all the uploaded screenshots..
A task perfectly fitted for our long time UNIX friend find and his cousin cron! Cron is a time-based job scheduler and find.. finds files.
What I want is to delete all uploaded screenshots on a nightly basis. Each uploaded file is stored in a directory of its own. Im using an apache2 webserver to host the files thus all files are owned by user www-data. I want this nightly cleaning mission to be run by this user. www-data is not allowed to log in herself why we will have to add the cleaning job to her crontab as a normal user. The command below will open up www-data’s crontab in your favourite editor (vi).
sudo crontab -u www-data -e
To run the cleaning job at midnight, enter the row below, but replace /path/to/www-server/and/uploads with the actual path to your web servers doc root and uploads directory.
0 0 * * * find /path/to/www-server/and/uploads/* -prune -type d -print0 -exec rm -rf {} \;
Save and exit the file.
Rejoice!
