Bash – How to delete directories older than one hour (cron job)

bashcron

My application creates directories when user performs certain action. These directories are stored on my machine for exactly one hour and than are deleted.

Now I would like to move the 'deleting logic' part of application into a cron job that will run every minute.

Let's say that directories for deletion are located in /tmp/files/. The script should check all directories in this path and delete all that was created one hour ago.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

** SOLVED **

This will do the trick:

find ./* -mmin +60 -type d -exec rm -rdf {} \;

Best Answer

You shouldn't use find ./* because this causes the shell to expand the wildcard before invoking find which will fail if there are too many files.

Instead, you need to pass "./*" to the find command like this:

find . -type d -path "./*" -mmin +60 -exec rm -rf {} \;

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Cron job remove / delete file

Some observations:

The fifth column of a crontab entry has a range of 0 (Sunday) to 6 (Saturday), not 1-7.
Environment settings in a cron job are pretty sparse and tasks will often behave differently than they would in your interactive shell. It's a long shot, but make sure that the rm command is in the $PATH variable.
Debugging cron jobs is tricky. Sometimes output from a job that isn't redirected to a file is mailed to you. Sometimes it isn't. Exercise more control over the output of your jobs:
```
* * * * * my_cron_job >> /home/me/cron_job.log 2 >> /home/me/cron_job.err
```
Try something simple to make sure cron is working and working the way you expect it to. Something like:
```
* * * * * /usr/bin/date >> /home/me/cron.test 2>&1
```
will test the basic functionality. You can make it more complicated from there.

Delete all files older than X days

Add this line to the script (modify accordingly):

find /path/to/backup_folder -mtime +3 -exec rm {} \;

This assumes your backup tarballs and only your backup tarballs reside in that folder. You could also use the tmpwatch utility:

tmpwatch -mf /path/to/backup_folder 72

Best Answer

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