How can I make a script to place files older than each day before into their own folder?

Question

I'm running an unnecessarily complex script which looks similar to this command:

find /home/user/videos/*.avi -mtime +0 -exec mv -f {} "/home/nb/videos/1 day old" \;

And then I run the same command, but this time, from the "1 day old" folder into a "2 days old" folder. And some more commands keep repeating all the way up to 7 days old! So each day, files from the previous "X days old" folder move into the next day up's folder.

I'm basically trying to organise files automatically, running in cron, to move files older then X days into the correct folder. It's inefficient, but I do need this to happen. Is there any easier, more efficient way?

Once it gets to the 7 days old folder, I have the final command which removes files older than 7 days from that last folder.

Answer 1

I use (for a similar situation) a non-standard way: logrotate.

This will back up all videos in /home/user/videos to the /home/nb/videos/backup/videos.tar file (daily), and then automatically move the old tar files to ...1.tar, ...2.tar etc. Backups older than 7 days will be deleted.

I included mv /home/user/videos/*.avi /var/tmp to keep a copy of videos in case anything goes wrong.

To activate this logrotate configuration put a similar file to this to the /etc/logrotate.d directory:

/home/nb/videos/backup/videos.tar {
  rotate 7
  daily
  notifempty
  nocreate
  nocompress
  missingok

  postrotate
    if ls /home/user/videos/*.avi > /dev/null 2>&1; then
      tar cf /home/nb/videos/backup/videos.tar /home/user/videos/*.avi
      mv /home/user/videos/*.avi /var/tmp
    fi
  endscript
}

For more information see man logrotate.