Delete file if it is owned by specific user

Question

There is a file that is sometimes not owned by root

I want my perl script in linux to basically check if a file is owned by root if it is delete it.

Currently what I have unlink("$File_Path/File_Name");

but this just deletes the file I want it to check if it's owned by root first then delete otherwise ignore.

can you please guide me how I can achieve this I am out of ideas?

Answer 1

The documentation for stat shows that the fifth element in the returned list is " numeric user ID of file's owner ". The superuser account on *nix must have uid of 0 , so

if ( (stat $fqn)[4] == 0 ) {
    unlink $fqn or die "Error with unlink($fqn): $!";
}

Answer 2

If you're doing this to a bunch of files in a folder somewhere, you might be better off by just one of these:

find /folder/somewhere/ -type f -user root -exec rm {} \;
find /folder/somewhere/ -type f -user root -exec rm -i {} \;   #interactive y/n each file
find /folder/somewhere/ -type f -user root -print0 | xargs -r0 rm

You might also need sudo in front of find . Careful though, this is a kind of command that can do a lot of harm...