Get Rid of Old IFS Files
November 20, 2002 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Hey, Ted:
The Integrated File System (IFS) on my system is filling up and I need to clean house. Is there anything in your bag of Qshell tricks that will tell me which files in an IFS directory have not been used recently?
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— Neal
Yes, Neal, Qshell can handle the job. However, it may not be the best solution. I will show you how to tackle this project with Qshell and then offer an alternative.
Qshell’s ls utility lists the contents of a directory. To see all the files in a directory in chronological order–from earliest to latest date of use–use the cd command to change to the directory in question and run the following ls command:
ls -lTtur
Here is what the options mean:
- l (letter l) — Produce a long listing. This gives more information about each file, including the last-used date.
- T — Display full date and time information.
- t — Sort by date and time rather than alphabetically by file name.
- u — Include the last used date rather than the change date in the listing. You can see this same date by running the Work with Links (WRKLNK) command, using option 8 to display file attributes and paging to the second panel. This date is listed as Last access date/time.
- r — Reverse the sort. Since the normal sort order shows the most recently used files first and least recently used files last, the r option forces ls to display results in the opposite sort order, where the least recently used files are listed first.
If the listing is too big, you may want to list only a few of the records. You can use the head utility to see the first portion of a file:
ls -lTtur | head -n 15
The head utility displays only the first fifteen records. However, you only see fourteen file names, because the first record displays the sum of the sizes of the files in the directory:
total: 3.012 megabytes
If you don’t want that record, use the sed editor to delete it from the output stream:
ls -lTtur | head -n 13 | sed '1d'
The output will resemble the following example:
-rw-r--r-- 1 JSMITH 0 472 Apr 2 23:50:09 2002 tscript.zip -rwxrwx--- 1 JSMITH 0 0 Apr 3 21:42:28 2002 mydata.text -rwxrwx--- 1 JSMITH 0 608 Apr 29 10:39:10 2002 mymsgcat -rwx------ 1 JSMITH 0 308 Jun 3 11:05:27 2002 uuu.bak -rw-rw-rw- 1 JSMITH 0 254 Jun 26 21:50:14 2002 rirp.zip -rw-rw---- 1 JSMITH 0 7 Jul 24 16:42:32 2002 temp.data -rwx------ 1 JSMITH 0 308 Jul 29 08:56:32 2002 two.abc -rwxrwx--- 1 JSMITH 0 53 Jul 29 14:16:06 2002 two.bak -rw-rw-rw- 1 JSMITH 0 48 Aug 31 07:38:28 2002 tmp -rw-rw---- 1 JSMITH 0 0 Sep 5 15:38:26 2002 grep1.out -rw-rw-rw- 1 JSMITH 0 283 Sep 5 15:38:26 2002 fruit.java.1 -rwxrwx--- 1 JSMITH 0 12 Sep 6 05:09:14 2002 grepex1
The alternative I mentioned is the iSeries Navigator, or Operations Navigator, as it used to be named. When you open an iSeries Navigator connection, you will see a subfolder for File Systems in the navigation pane. Under that is a folder for the IFS. Navigate to and open the desired directory. You’ll see columns labeled Changed, Accessed, and Created. Clicking on these column headings will sort the list of file names by the chosen date attribute in either ascending or descending order.
— Ted
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