Very Computer

Hi!

I'm working on a tool to cleanup linux parititions (removing backup files,
unneeded zip-files, files not accessed for a certain period etc. To do this,
I have to scan all directories. I have found a way to scan the root
directory (with calls in <dir.h> en <linux/dirent.h>) but they only return
the name of the entry, not the type. To examine type and time, i need to
access the inode. I got a inode-number, but no pointer to the inode. I
searched the .h files, but all calls to request inodes require a superblock
or __KERNEL__ defined. Can someone tell me:
1) How to access inodes in a normal program

or

2) How to find the superblock of the root device

3) Has anyone some interesting tips or ideas about scanning the filesystem ?

Maybe I didn't see the very simple solution, but after days of searching I
think this is a more efficient way...

Greetz,

Jos
--

However it may be worth your while to look at what the "find" command
does. Expressing "delete all the emacs backup files not accessed in
the last week" as a command is

  find / -name '*~' -atime +7 | xargs rm

It may be argued that this is a little cryptic but it's almost
certainly fewer lines of code than you will need in C.

--
Paul

Quote:>Hi!

>I'm working on a tool to cleanup linux parititions (removing backup files,
>unneeded zip-files, files not accessed for a certain period etc. To do this,
>I have to scan all directories. I have found a way to scan the root
>directory (with calls in <dir.h> en <linux/dirent.h>) but they only return
>the name of the entry, not the type. To examine type and time, i need to
>access the inode. I got a inode-number, but no pointer to the inode. I
>searched the .h files, but all calls to request inodes require a superblock
>or __KERNEL__ defined. Can someone tell me:

reveals that stat() and friends might be useful

regards

marc

--

Return address mangled to dodge spam. Consult
http://jade.cs.uct.ac.za/m/address.html
for proper address

I don't have a url handy, but it is not hard to find. It is available as
an rpm from
Red Had contrib directory, from debian as a deb file, or as a tar.gz
from the gnu home
site.

regards, Frank Ranner

: Hi!

: I'm working on a tool to cleanup linux parititions (removing backup files,
: unneeded zip-files, files not accessed for a certain period etc. To do this,
: I have to scan all directories. I have found a way to scan the root
: directory (with calls in <dir.h> en <linux/dirent.h>) but they only return
: the name of the entry, not the type. To examine type and time, i need to
: access the inode. I got a inode-number, but no pointer to the inode. I
: searched the .h files, but all calls to request inodes require a superblock
: or __KERNEL__ defined. Can someone tell me:

why do not use tools which already exist?
just popen("/usr/bin/find / -ls","r")

For me, task you described is not job for C program at all. Much
similier (and easier to maintain) to write it as shell script, or
perl script, if you want to parse human readable config files.
Or Tcl/Tk if you want GUI.

: 1) How to access inodes in a normal program

If I have been forced to write this in C without using find, I
probably wouldn't bother with analysing inodes anyway. May be
I would use opendir() if glob() prove to be to inefficient, but
stat() for accessing neccessary information.
: or

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