Tadeusz Pietraszek

© 2004-2007 Tadeusz Pietraszek

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Removing all files older than X days

I know it’s easy, but every time I write it I have to study the man page of `find` to figure out the correct parameters:

File only deletion:

find

-atime +7 -type f -print | xargs rm -f

Recursive deletion (be careful):

find

-atime +7 -print | xargs rm -rf

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Tips&Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Removing all files older than X days”

  1. Yannick Says:
    March 20th, 2008 at 12:00 am

    I usualy use -mtime instead -atime

  2. DJ Says:
    March 24th, 2008 at 11:46 pm

    I prefer to use -exec instead, as if find returns an extremely large amount of data, you will run into limitations with xargs.

    find -atime +7 -type f -exec rm -f {} ;

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