Mac OS X Server

Cleaning Up Podcast Producer

THIS CAN BE A VERY DANGEROUS COMMAND, USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK.

I’ve been seeing Podcast Producer deployed into a number of different types of environments. One of these is into school environments with quarterly turnover cycles. In these environments, all blog posts over a certain number of days old should be deleted routinely (namely when the quarter changes). Because in some environments, there can be hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, removing old content is cumbersome at best.

Never fear, the find command can look at just items that have aged a certain number of days. This is accomplished using the -mtime options. The find command can also execute a command. By default a blog will be stored in a folder called /Library/Collaboration/Users//weblog directory. If you replace the aforementioned with a users name or the /Users with Groups and place a group blog name in the place of then you can view the files that make up the posts. Combined you can clear out old content from the wiki (be it 7 years or 7 days).

In the following example, we’re going to delete all contents from the krypted user blog that is older than 90 days:

find /Library/Collaboration/Users/krypted/weblog -mtime +90 -exec rm. {} ;

The same command can then be used with the path of your video repository rather than the weblog. One will remove the videos, the other the impact of those posts to user experience.