An expression term lacks a required parameter.

I'm trying to get a cron job to run on AIX 5.2 but I keep getting the a message about it lacking a required parameter. Below is what shows when run from the command line which is the same as in the cron job. I added in the second \ on a sugestion I found on another site but with only one it still does not work and gives the same error from the cron job but running with only one \ from the command line does not give an error, but does not remove the files either.

Does anyone have any ideas on what else I could try.

/usr/bin/find /u01/arch/PRD6 -name "*.log" -atime +7 -exec /sbin/rm {} \\;
find: 0652-018 An expression term lacks a required parameter.

are you trying to pipe the results of the search to the rm command and have them all removed? Where is the pipe? I am not that familiar with AIX.. but it appears as if you are giving everything including the rm command as parameters to the find command.

-Steven

That is what its supposed to do. But looking through the man file for find there is an example of:

10. To find and remove every file in your home directory with the .c suffix,
type:

find /u/arnold -name "*.c" -exec rm {} \;

Every time the find command identifies a file with the .c suffix, the rm
command deletes that file. The rm command is the only parameter specified
for the -exec expression. The {} (braces) represent the current path name.

looks to me as if this should take care of it.

Bruce

It's the asterisk.
Try:

nope still getting the lacks a required parameter from the command line. This is driving me crazy. It should be so simple. I guess I could just pay for support call to IBM, because something has to be screwy with this version of AIX. Every resource I've found does not seem to work.

Well maybe I'm on to a little something this works

find /u01/arch/PRD6 -name '*.log' -mtime +5 -exec rm {} \;

Not sure why atime will not and mtime does. I'm goign to stick it in the cron and see what happens in a couple of days after I get some more log files built up. I also went to the single quote which seems to make a difference too.