what does 'az storage blob delete-batch' do?

[ormico]

I'm trying to delete a large number of blobs from a storage container. I'm currently using delete but I saw delete-batch and was interested if it would help. However, I found the documentation to be a little sparse as to what it actually does.

The doc page
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/storage/blob?view=azure-cli-latest#az_storage_blob_delete_batch
says

Delete blobs from a blob container recursively.

as its only description of it's functionality.

Can someone explain what this is supposed to do or how it works? The above description wasn't clear to me.

Thanks.

[williexu]

storage blob delete-batch was made for situations like yours, where a large number of blobs need to be deleted.
Essentially, bare-bones, you can specify a container using the --source/-s and all blobs will be deleted from said container.
You can narrow down the scope by using the --pattern parameter; e.g. using --pattern directory* will delete all blobs who's name starts with "directory"

[ormico]

Thanks. I ended up doing it through powershell but it took a long time to run.

What kind of patterns does --pattern support. The doc says

--pattern
The pattern used for globbing files or blobs in the source. The supported patterns are '*', '?', '[seq]', and '[!seq]'.

Would "myapp_log_*.trn" work?

I don't recognize [seq]. What type of pattern is that?

[williexu]

myapp_log_*.trn would match myapp_log_<any character(s)>.trn.
If that your goal, then yes.
[seq] allows you to specify a number of characters to match for.
We are using fnmatch under the hood.

[arbaiti]

Hello,
I need to do cleanup of dump files on a blob container, and i don't know how to use this command.
I should delete dump older than 14 days.
Regards,

[williexu]

@arbaiti use the --if-unmodified-since parameter.
#5286 should be fixed with our next release.

In the meantime, you can query for the properties.lastModified datetime value and compare it with the datetime you want.

This should also answer your question: #5575 (comment)
Next time, please limit your comments to one issue (or file a new issue) if they are all related.

[arbaiti]

Do you have any example with --if-unmodified-since parameter ?

[williexu]

Bash:

az storage blob delete-batch --source backups --if-unmodified-since `date -ud "14 day ago" '+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%MZ'`

[arbaiti]

Thanks for your reply i'll test it