Contacting file owners: using find, awk, and xargs to creating lists of files and operate on them

Say you want to contact a bunch of file owners to do some cleanup or housekeeping. This will get you a list of files sorted by owner.

find . -type f -name "*blah*" "%u %M %g %y %p\n" | sort

But we can do better. Here is a neat little awk command that will drop filenames into txt files named after the user.

find . -type f -name "*blah*" "%u %M %g %y %p\n" | sort | awk 'BEGIN {FS=" "} { print $5 >>"/home/me/temp/"$1".txt" }'

So the end result is that /home/me/temp/mike.txt contains a list of files that mike owns. You can then tell mike to do something with those files (in this example, delete) using xargs like this:

xargs -a mike.txt rm -f

How do you tell mike? well you can get a list of addresses to drop into your mail client:

find . -type f -name "*blah*" "%u@company.com\n" | sort | uniq

then drag and drop the USERNAME.txt files into the mail. With a bit more effort you could automate the sending mail step too.