Delete by modification date

[Ray_Barber]

Here is a script I wrote to kill files whose modification date is 11 days old. The only way I found to do that to a number of files was to check each file, one at a time. The script does what I want it to but it takes a very long time to go through all my files. The folder I am checking typically contains about 600 files and sits on a Win 2K server. My Mac and the server are on 100 mps network but it takes my PowerBook G4 with OS 9.2 over an hour to complete the task. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I might rewrite the script to make it work faster?

I’d use the “the entries in” command from the Akua Sweets package to extract a list of aliases of all the files with a mod date before a given date. Tell the Finder to delete that list and you’re all done:

set theFldr to (choose folder with prompt "Pick a folder:") 
set cutOff to (current date) - (11 * days) 
set delList to (the entries in theFldr ¬ 
that were modified before cutOff ¬ 
whose kinds are file ¬ 
to a depth of -1 as alias) 
tell application "Finder" to delete delList

[kel]

Hi,
Also, you could use the every element reference form with a filter. I haven’t tried this with modification date less than something yet, but, I think it should work.

et the_folder to choose folder 
set min_date to ((current date) - 11 * days) 
tell application "Finder" 
 delete (every file of the_folder whose modification date is less than min_date) 
end tell

Hope its faster too.

Good luck, Kel.

[kel]

Wait, there may bne some kind of bug with the filter reference form and dates. Think I read about it at AppleScript Sourcebook.
Later,

[kel]

Yep, you may want to disregard this. There’s a bug in AppleScript 1.3.7 where, ‘whose modification date < some other date’. It may have been fixed in later versions, but, I don’t know.