629338 - consider adding "-prune" to cleanup cronjobs that use find

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Release Engineering :: General, defect, P2)

Description

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

We got all sorts of cronmail from cronjobs with errors like:
find: /data/ftp/pub/firefox/nightly/2011/01/2011-01-21-17-mozilla-central: No such file or directory
find: /data/ftp/pub/firefox/nightly/2011/01/2011-01-21-07-mozilla-1.9.1: No such file or directory
find: /data/ftp/pub/firefox/nightly/2011/01/2011-01-16-03-mozilla-1.9.2-l10n: No such file or directory


I believe that we can fix them with adding "-prune" to these cronjobs. See below for an example.

Without prune:
[] bhearsum@voot:~/tmp/test$ mkdir -p 1/2/3/4/5
[] bhearsum@voot:~/tmp/test$ find .  -name 3 -exec rm -rf {} \;
find: `./1/2/3': No such file or directory
[] bhearsum@voot:~/tmp/test$ find .
.
./1
./1/2

With prune:
[] bhearsum@voot:~/tmp/test$ mkdir -p 1/2/3/4/5
[] bhearsum@voot:~/tmp/test$ find .  -name 3 -prune -exec rm -rf {} \;
[] bhearsum@voot:~/tmp/test$ find .
.
./1
./1/2

Comment 1

[Chris Cooper [:coop] (he/him)]

I've added -prune to the ffxbld/trybld cron jobs on stage. 

In most cases the jobs are running concurrently (@hourly) and probably trampling over each other, so hopefully this will help.

Comment 2

[Chris Cooper [:coop] (he/him)]

FWIW, I've had to roll this back in almost every case. Adding -prune actually prevents the cronjob from doing it's intended cleanup. 

To make this work, we'd need to switch to guaranteed two-step cronjobs for all our cleanups where we'd remove old files first and then remove empty dirs. 

The alternative is to live with a few missing dirs in the emails (status quo).