Ubuntu – How to move files older than X to another folder

You need to reformat your command a bit for it to work.

Try this:

find "/home/user/videos folder" -name "*.avi" -mtime +7 -exec rm -f {} \;

Or, in GNU find, to achieve the same thing without -exec:

find "/home/user/videos folder" -name "*.avi" -mtime +7 -delete

The first argument to find is the folder to look in - you shouldn't try and put your entire filter in here, just the starting point. Then use -name to tell it what pattern to look for. You can try this without the -exec or -delete first until you are satisified, then you won't do any damage by trying it.

Enclosing an argument in quotes basically stops the shell from messing with it. If you use -name *.avi, then the argument that find will see could be anything, because the shell will parse it (and replace it with the contents of the current directory that end in .avi) before calling find. This is usually bad and will lead to unexpected results. find knows how to parse * itself.

I use (for a similar situation) a non-standard way: logrotate.

This will back up all videos in /home/user/videos to the /home/nb/videos/backup/videos.tar file (daily), and then automatically move the old tar files to ...1.tar, ...2.tar etc. Backups older than 7 days will be deleted.

I included mv /home/user/videos/*.avi /var/tmp to keep a copy of videos in case anything goes wrong.

To activate this logrotate configuration put a similar file to this to the /etc/logrotate.d directory:

/home/nb/videos/backup/videos.tar {
  rotate 7
  daily
  notifempty
  nocreate
  nocompress
  missingok

  postrotate
    if ls /home/user/videos/*.avi > /dev/null 2>&1; then
      tar cf /home/nb/videos/backup/videos.tar /home/user/videos/*.avi
      mv /home/user/videos/*.avi /var/tmp
    fi
  endscript
}

For more information see man logrotate.