From my last posting about ZFS “Fun with ZFS send and receive” we see that the ZFS commands are really easy to use but very powerful, because of this I find it easy to write scripts to do the things I need. Here is some code that I use for snapshots, it’s written in python but can be ported to anything as it’s taking command line output and parsing info for what it needs.

Making Snapshots:⌗

This code is used to make snapshots of all the file systems on a zpool. Just edit the zpoolName to be the name of the zpool you want to work with. The main command line in code is zfs list -o name | grep zpoolName which outputs a list of filesystems onto the zpool which is used in the code to make snapshots with a timestamp in the snapshots name.

Removing Snapshots:⌗

This code is paired with the one that takes the snapshots. It will remove old snapshots after a set number of days by reading the timestamp in the snapshots name. The main command here is zfs list -H -t snapshot | awk '{print $1}' | grep zpoolName which should output a list of all the snapshots on the zpoolName.

Open to comments or any ideas to make my code better.