Find – How to Delete Files by Age

findrm

Is there a command to delete all the files in a directory that haven't been modified in N days? I need to clean up some old logs.

Best Answer

This will delete all files older than 5 days, you can put a -name '*log' in there too to be more precise and you might want to specify a maxdepth in the find command too.

find /some/dir -type f -mtime +5 -delete

Related Solutions

Command Line – Get Files Modified on a Specific Date

On recent versions of find (e.g. GNU 4.4.0) you can use the -newermt option. For example, to find all files that have been modified on the 2011-02-08

$ find /var/www/html/dir/ -type f -name "*.php" -newermt 2011-02-08 ! -newermt 2011-02-09

Also note that you don't need to pipe into grep to find php files because find can do that for you in the -name option.

Take a look at this SO answer for more suggestions: How to use 'find' to search for files created on a specific date?

Find directories without music files

I found this example on SO, titled: Terminal - Delete All Folders Not Conatining .mp3 Files.

#! /bin/bash

find -depth -type d | while read -r D
 do
 v=$(find "$D" -iname '*.mp3')
 case "$v" in
 ""  )
    echo "$D no mp3"
    # rm -fr "$D" #uncomment to use
 ;;
 esac
done

Example

Sample data.

.
|-- 1
|   |-- 1.mp3
|   `-- 1.txt
|-- 2
|   `-- 2.mp3
|-- 3
|   `-- 3.txt
|-- 4
|   `-- 4.txt
|-- 5
|   `-- 5.mp3
|-- 6
|   `-- 61
|       `-- 61.mp3
|-- 7
|   `-- 71
|       `-- 71.txt
`-- deletenomp3.bash

Sample run

If I were to run it it would delete the following:

$ ./deletenomp3.bash 
./7 no mp3
./7/71 no mp3
./4 no mp3
./3 no mp3

Other file types

You can simply extend this by adding more -name arguments to the 2nd find command in the script. Example, to add .wav files:

 v=$(find "$D" -iname '*.mp3' -o -iname '*.wav');

That says *.mp3 OR *.wav. To add more or others:

 v=$(find "$D" -iname '*.mp3' -o -iname '*.flac' -o -iname '*.m4a');

I'm sure this block could be condensed if you had a lot more file types using alternative switching to find.