Admins eHow SysAdmin Tips & Tricks

July 24, 2009

Delete Files Older Than x Days on Linux

Filed under: CentOS,Debian,General — Tags: , , , — admin @ 1:40 pm

The find utility on linux allows you to pass in a bunch of interesting arguments, including one to execute another command on each file. We’ll use this in order to figure out what files are older than a certain number of days, and then use the rm command to delete them.

Command Syntax

find /path/to/files* -mtime +5 -exec rm {} \;

Note that there are spaces between rm, {}, and \;

Explanation

  • The first argument is the path to the files. This can be a path, a directory, or a wildcard as in the example above. I would recommend using the full path, and make sure that you run the command without the exec rm to make sure you are getting the right results.
  • The second argument, -mtime, is used to specify the number of days old that the file is. If you enter +5, it will find files older than 5 days.
  • The third argument, -exec, allows you to pass in a command such as rm. The {} \; at the end is required to end the command.

or you can use the following command :

find /path/to/files* -mtime +5 | xargs rm -f

This should work on Ubuntu, Suse, Redhat, or pretty much any version of linux.

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