datefilter

Filter filenames on stdin to exclude filenames for dates which should be kept, and filenames not containing dates.

This is intended to be part of a pipeline for removing old dated files or old ZFS snapshots.

Usage

$ ls *.backup | datefilter --days=31 --months=12 --years=10 | xargs rm

The pipeline above will delete all *.backup files which contain a YYYY-MM-DD substring in their filename, where that date is NOT:

• a day in the last 31 days, and not
• the first day of a month in the last 12 months, and not
• New Years Day in the last 10 years.

All date-containing filenames, not matching the above criteria, will be written to stdout (and deleted by xargs/rm in the example above).

Defaults

28 days, 12 months and 100 years.

Bugs

Filenames containing newlines or other whitespace will not be processed correctly.