Delete files between two dates

filesrhel

I have a folder in which there are very old files. It contains files since 2009 and they are dump files with error log.

What I want to know is if it is possible to delete the files between let's say 2009 and 2011. Something like:

delete 'file_patern' between 2009-2011 and 2012-2014

I want to preserve for example 2010, 2015 and current year.

Machine is running on RedHat.

To list all files that were modified between 2009 and 2011, use find with -newermt:

 find . -type f -newermt '01 jan 2009 00:00:00' -not -newermt '01 jan 2012 00:00:00' -ls

To remove:

find . -type f -newermt '01 jan 2009 00:00:00' -not -newermt '01 jan 2012 00:00:00' -delete

Check the permissions of the directory. To delete a file inside it, it should be writable by you

chmod ugo+w .

and not immutable or append-only:

chattr -i -a .

Check with ls -la and lsattr -a.

Looks like your question is "How to list files by pattern excluding directories with ls only".

There is no way to do it with pure ls. You can combine ls + grep like:

ls -ld *2010* | grep -v '^d'

However it's much better to use find for that:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "*2010*"