Find and clear log files in Linux

Objective:

Find and clear the files with extension of *.log, usually log files.

Commands:

find . -type f -iname *.log -exec tee {} \; </dev/null

This command will find the files with extension of 'log' and empty that file. Which means file will be there and data of that file will be cleared.

If you are using cPanel, there will be a directory called "virtfs", in that case you can use following command.

find /home -type f -iname *.log -not -path "./virtfs/*" -exec tee {} \; </dev/null

Please note, in WHM / cPanel server, this will clear logs including created by server.

So, If you need to do this manually for specific file, you can simply use any of following commands,

# > file.name

# :> file.name

# true > file.name

# echo "" > file.name

# echo  > file.name

# dd if=/dev/null of=logfile

# dd if=/dev/null > logfile

Still there are several methods to clear it.

Finding multiple folders in Linux with single command

Finding multiple folders with single commend on Linux is not a big deal.

I wanna know all temp / tmp and cache folders in websites, that are configured with WHM to exclude from the backup. Here is the command for that,


find /home/*/public_html \( -type d -iname "cache" -or -iname "tmp" -or -iname "temp" \)

To know size of these folders,

find /home/*/public_html \( -type d -iname "cache" -or -iname "tmp" -or -iname "temp" \) -exec du -sh {} \;

Finding files with in date range

Here is the command for find files that was modifed between 1st July 2018 to 20th July 2018 with it's details,

find . -type f -name "*.php" -newermt 2018-07-01 ! -newermt 2018-07-21 -exec ls -l {} \;

Please note, you have to mention next date of till date.