bash session killer

I ran into a problem with a site I’m building that will run on shared hosting. I wanted to use sessions in php but because of the hosting my sessions kept being unexpectedly ended. The solution was to define a new folder on the server for the sessions to be stored in. This was done with the php.ini configuration file.

However this lead to another problem – the session files just seemed to get left on the server. As I understand it this is because the garbage collection mechanism in php won’t work if you change the folder where session files are stored.

The solution was in a little bit of BASH scripting. Basically the script is run by the cron tab at a sensible interval. When it runs it checks the directory specified and deletes anything older than the number of mins specified.

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#! /bin/bash
cd /path/to/folder/; find -cmin +60 | xargs rm

A word of warning, make sure you get the path right. First time round I didn’t and it deleted EVERYTHING it could on my server. I lost all development work and a live site. So back up and use with caution. Still at least it proved my backup strategy works

Don’t forget to make the .sh file executable (744) did it for me.