Goldengate Manager is not Deleting|Purging Old Trail Files

Problem:

In a Goldengate 19.1.0.0.1 setup, the following line was set inside inside mgr.prm to automatically delete the processes trail files older than 10 hours, but unfortunately the trail files are not getting deleted:

# cat mgr.prm | grep PURGEOLDEXTRACTS

PURGEOLDEXTRACTS /goldengate/ggdata/*  , USECHECKPOINTS, MINKEEPHOURS 24

I can see I've trail files as old as 10 days back:

[goldengate@ggserver ggdata]$ ll /goldengate/ggdata
total 228G
-rw-r----- 1 goldengate goldengate  96M Apr  3 22:55 RB000000000
-rw-r----- 1 goldengate goldengate  96M Apr  3 23:00 RB000000001
-rw-r----- 1 goldengate goldengate  96M Apr  3 23:00 RB000000002
-rw-r----- 1 goldengate goldengate  96M Apr  3 23:09 RC000000000
....
-rw-r----- 1 goldengate goldengate  96M Apr 13 08:03 RD000000365
-rw-r----- 1 goldengate goldengate  96M Apr 13 08:10 RC000001055
-rw-r----- 1 goldengate goldengate  96M Apr 13 08:13 RA000000409

Analysis:

The trail files location /goldengate/ggdata was a symbolic link for the actual location which was /u01/goldengate/ggdata

[goldengate@ggserver ggdata]$ ll /u01/goldengate/ggdata
lrwxrwxrwx 1 goldengate goldengate 11 Oct  4  2022 /u01/goldengate/ggdata -> /goldengate/ggdata
 

Solution:

Make sure the trail files location in  PURGEOLDEXTRACTS parameter line refers to the actual location, not to a symbolic link.

# cat mgr.prm | grep PURGEOLDEXTRACTS

PURGEOLDEXTRACTS /u01/goldengate/ggdata/*  , USECHECKPOINTS, MINKEEPHOURS 24