Shell – Delete files based on year

This will delete all the files with a name ending in .swp, ~, .netrwhist, .log or .bak anywhere under your home directory. No prompt, no confirmation, no recovery, the files are gone forever.

find ~ -type f \( -name '*.swp' -o -name '*~' -o -name '*.bak' -o -name '.netrwhist' \) -delete

(I purposefully omit *.log because it sounds dangerous, this is not a common extension for temporary files and there are plenty of non-temporary files with that name.)

If your OS isn't Linux, replace -delete by -exec rm {} +.

You should perhaps configure Vim to put its swap files in a single directory by setting the directory option:

set dir=~/tmp/vim-swap-files//,/var/tmp//

Create the directory first. The // at the end makes the swap file name include the directory location of the original file, so that files with the same name in different directories don't cause a crash.

You can do the same thing for backup files with the backupdir option, though it makes a lot less sense.

If you use Emacs, set auto-save-file-name-transforms to point every file to a single directory.

(setq auto-save-file-name-transforms
      '("\\`.*\\'" "~/tmp/emacs-auto-save-files/\\&" t))

You want logrotate http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/logrotate8.html.

It is probably already on your system. You just need to configure it. However it is mainly for the purpose of purging old log files and I don't know if you can configure it to keep one file.

What you can do

create several directories log, log.weekly, log.monthly, and log.yearly

log being where all the log files go. Create

• a weekly cron job that copies the latest log file from log to log.weekly,
• a monthly cron job that copies the latest log file from log to log.monthly, and
• a yearly cron job that copies the latest log file from log to log.yearly.

Then configure logrotate appropriately for the different directories.

    #!/bin/bash

    NOW=$(date +%


    ls -rt1 ${LOG} | while read FILE
    do
        TVAL=$(stat --printf %W ${LOG}/${FILE})
        if [ $(ls -1 ${LOG.WEEKLY} | wc -l) ] -eq 0 ]
        then
             cp ${LOG}/${FILE} ${LOG.WEEKLY}/${FILE}
        else
             LAST_WEEKLY=$(ls -t1 ${LOG.WEEKLY} | head -n 1 | stat --printf %W)
             if [ $((${TVAL}-${LAST_WEEKLY})) -gt $((60*60*24*7)) ]
             then
                 cp ${LOG}/${FILE} ${LOG.WEEKLY}/${FILE}
             fi
        fi
   # repeat the above logic for month and year
   rm ${LOG}/${FILE} 
   done