Ubuntu – Delete files older than 5 days as well as in all subfolders

deletedirectoryrm

I need to delete all files older than 5 days in all subfolders, but not the folders themselves. I know the command:

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

But how can I tell Ubuntu to check in all subfolders, yet never delete the folders themselves. Will I need a -maxdepth 5 somewhere?

Thanks.

Best Answer

First of all, don't give a glob to find (no files*), just give it the parent directory (/path/to/). It will deal with recursing into it and finding all files. Next, rm will never delete directories, so you don't need to worry about that either. Still, the simplest way is:

find /path/to/ -type f -mtime +5 -delete

Note the -type f which tells find to only look at files and the -delete which, well, deletes them. This is more efficient than calling a separate rm for each result.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Can a directory’s mtime be older than that of file inside

On linux directory modification time change if you:

add a new file
remove an existent a file
or rename a file in it

If you change content of existent file, this is not reflected up to directory.

Because of this, I suggest to use these commands:

    find /path/to/folder -type f -mtime +30 -delete

this command remove recursively file older than 30 days and preserve folder.

    find /path/to/folder -type d -empty -delete

this remove empty directory if any.

Source:

Directory last modified date

How do I delete all empty directories in a directory from the command line?

Ubuntu – Removing files older than 7 days

As @Jos pointed out you missed a space between name and '*.gz'; also for speeding up the command use -type f option to running the command on files only.

So the fixed command would be:

find /path/to/ -type f -mtime +7 -name '*.gz' -execdir rm -- '{}' \;

Explanation:

find: the unix command for finding files/directories/links and etc.
/path/to/: the directory to start your search in.
-type f: only find files.
-name '*.gz': list files that ends with .gz.
-mtime +7: only consider the ones with modification time older than 7 days.
-execdir ... \;: for each such result found, do the following command in ....
rm -- '{}': remove the file; the {} part is where the find result gets substituted into from the previous part. -- means end of command parameters avoid prompting error for those files starting with hyphen.

Alternatively, use:

find /path/to/ -type f -mtime +7 -name '*.gz' -print0 | xargs -r0 rm --

From man find:

-print0 
      True; print the full file name on the standard output, followed by a null character 
  (instead of the newline character that -print uses). This allows file names that contain
  newlines or other types of white space to be correctly interpreted by programs that process
  the find output. This option corresponds to the -0 option of xargs.

Which is a bit more efficient, because it amounts to:

rm file1 file2 file3 ...

as opposed to:

rm file1; rm file2; rm file3; ...

as in the -exec method.

An alternative and also faster command is using exec's + terminator instead of \;:

find /path/to/ -type f -mtime +7 -name '*.gz' -execdir rm -- '{}' +

This command will run rm only once at the end instead of each time a file is found and this command is almost as fast as using -delete option as following in modern find:

find /path/to/ -type f -mtime +7 -name '*.gz' -delete