Linux – Bash script to delete files older than x days with subdirectories

findlinux

I'm trying to delete a ton of files older than x days.

Now I have a script to do that

find /path/to/files* -mtime +10 -exec rm {} \;

But this will also delete the subdirectories. There are a ton of folders but I would like to keep them, and delete the files older than 10 days within the said folders.

Is there a way to do this?

Best Answer

`type` option for filtering results

find accepts the type option for selecting, for example, only files.

find /path/to/files -type f -mtime +10 -delete

Leave out -delete to show what it'd delete, and once you've verified that, go ahead and run the full command.

That would only run on files, not directories. Use -type d for the inverse, only listing directories that match your arguments.

Additional options

You might want to read man find, as there are some more options you could need in the future. For example, -maxdepth would allow you to only restrict the found items to a specific depth, e.g. -maxdepth 0 would not recurse into subdirectories.

Some remarks

I wonder how the command would have removed a folder, since you can't remove a folder with rm only. You'd need rm -r for that.
Also, /path/to/files* is confusing. Did you mean /path/to/files/ or are you expecting the wildcard to expand to several file and folder names?
Put the {} in single quotes, i.e. '{}' to avoid the substituted file/directory name to be interpreted by the shell, just like we protect the semicolon with a backslash.

Related Solutions

Linux – Find directories with all files inside older than X

It's probably possible to do this without creating files using process substitution or something, but here's a quick-and-dirty solution:

find . -type f -mtime +30 -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq > old.txt
find . -type f -mtime -30 -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq > new.txt
grep -vf new.txt old.txt

The first command outputs the path of every file modified more than 30 days ago (in find's -printf -- at least with the GNU find on my system -- %h prints the whole path except for the actual filename), then sorts those and gets rid of any duplicates, and puts the whole thing into a file called old.txt.

The second command does the same but with every file modified less than 30 days ago, and puts them into another file, new.txt.

The grep line prints every line from old.txt that doesn't appear in new.txt -- so it will give you a list of directories that contain only files that were last modified more than 30 days ago.

This is all using the GNU versions of the utilities. I don't know if the syntax matches up on the BSD versions, etc.

Linux – Bash script to delete files older than x days within a subdirectory tree

You can recursively list all regular files under \data that were last modified 30 days ago with

find /data -type f -mtime +30 -ls

But you have to note that mtime isn't necessarily the time of creation. I don't think that it's possible to check for time of creation. You just have ctime, atime and mtime to check for.

If you want to delete those files you can invoke a similar command

find /data -type f -mtime +30 -delete

Of course you can add this command to your crontab file.