Only keep x days of news downloads

[BoundforPNG]

I am making all of my news downloads work via script files and want an easy way to limit the amount of news downloads for a particular recipe to x number of days. Is there an easy way to do it? I could probably do it in a bash script but am not that familiar with it.

Also, I and using

xvfb-run calibredb add /home/cts/calibre-library/toadd/ -r --with-library /home/cts/calibre-library

in a crontab and am getting the following email every time it runs when there is nothing to add. Can I suppress this message and only get real error messages?

Backing up metadata
Notifying calibre of the change

[kovidgoyal]

The calibre gui has an option for that. If you dont want to use it, then you will have to script up your own solution for it using calibredb

[sws]

Hi,
I wrote a perl script for this problem. I am not really good at perl. I am quite sure that there are solutions more elegant than mine but it works for me. So here is my code. Take care to use YOUR tags in line 17 if you did not choose the german word for dailynews ("Tageszeitung")

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# file: cal_ex_alt_zeit.pl
# Author: Sebastian
# Version: 1.2
#
# This script deletes news from calibre database that are older than 2 days
# Three steps to do this:
# 1. collect a list of old newspapers
# 2. extract the IDs of those old newspapers
# 3. tell calibredb to delete those IDs



# 1. Collect a list of old newspapers
open(CALINDEX,">","old_newspapers.txt");
my @get_list = (" CALIBRE_OVERRIDE_LANG=en calibredb list --search 'date:<1daysago and tags:Tageszeitung' > old_newspapers.txt");
my @get_list_exec = system(@get_list);
close (CALINDEX);

# 2. extract the IDs  of old newspapers
# 2.1. extract IDs 
open(CALINDEX,"old_newspapers.txt");my $file = CALINDEX;
my @cal_index;
foreach my $line ( <$file> ) {
        if ( $line =~ /^\d/) {
        push @cal_index, substr $line,0,5;
        }
}
chomp @cal_index;

# 2.2 substitute blank characters by commata
open(DELINDEX,">","del_cal_index.txt");
print DELINDEX @cal_index;
close(DELINDEX);
open(DELINDEX,"del_cal_index.txt");
my $cal_ids = <DELINDEX>;
$cal_ids =~ s/\s/,/g;
$cal_ids =~ s/,$//;
chomp $cal_ids;
print $cal_ids;
close (DELINDEX);
close(CALINDEX);

# 3. give list of IDs to calibredb for deletion:
system("/usr/bin/calibredb","remove",$cal_ids) == 0
        or die "system failed: $?";

Regards,
Sebastian