Delete files older than X days +

Question

I have found the command to delete files older than 5 days in a folder

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

But how do I also do this for subdirectories in that folder?

Do you mean files inside the sub directories? or the sub directories themselves? — rahul, Apr 07 '15 at 16:35
Possibly fun when I have files with spaces. E.g a file called "test one" and rm gets fed rm test one. (Which will delete a file called "test" and a file called "one", but not a file called "test one"). Hint: -delete or -print0 — Hennes, Apr 07 '15 at 17:17
As a side note, always quote the argument provided by find to avoid issues with special characters, as mentioned in the answer's first line. E.g.: find /path/to/files/ -exec somecommand '{}' \; — Walf, Jun 17 '16 at 01:54
@Walf The only reason one would want to quote {} is if one's shell treats that 2-character string specially. I believe (t)csh does this, but no other shell that I know of. You don't have to quote {} in e.g. bash, no matter what filenames you come across. The POSIX standard guarantees that each found pathname will be given to the utility as a separate argument. — Kusalananda, Apr 03 '20 at 15:57
@Kusalananda or if you're writing a command that may end up getting executed in another shell like fish. Don't make assumptions, better safe than sorry, etc. Makes it obvious that it's an argument to find, like when you have to quote glob patterns inside -name (and related) arguments. — Walf, Apr 04 '20 at 12:28
The easiest way is the below . You can first check the file names count with the below for the last 2 months , then verify and check , then delete the files .
find . -iname "*.gz" -mindepth 1 -mtime +60 | wc -l

Then check the files find . -iname "*.gz" -mindepth 1 -mtime +60 -print

Once verified you can delete the same . find . -iname "*.gz" -mindepth 1 -mtime +60 | xargs rm -f — Seth Projnabrata, Nov 21 '20 at 07:20

score 407 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 13 '21 at 18:17

407

Be careful with special file names (spaces, quotes) when piping to rm.

There is a safe alternative - the -delete option:

find /path/to/directory/ -mindepth 1 -mtime +5 -delete

That's it, no separate rm call and you don't need to worry about file names.

Replace -delete with -depth -print to test this command before you run it (-delete implies -depth).

Explanation:

-mindepth 1: without this, . (the directory itself) might also match and therefore get deleted.
-mtime +5: process files whose data was last modified 5*24 hours ago.

edited Oct 13 '21 at 18:17

gilad905

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answered May 25 '15 at 16:44

basic6

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Also use -type f to delete files only (and keep sub directories) – Oleg Mar 04 '16 at 08:44
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Alternatively, if you want to do the same for all files NEWER than five days: find /path/to/directory/ -mindepth 1 -mtime -5 -delete – zmonteca Apr 19 '16 at 17:29
If my path contains spaces how should I do it? find /path/to/dir\ with\ spaces/ -mindepth 1 -mtime +5 -delete? – dokgu May 23 '17 at 19:59
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@uom-pgregorio I would suggest putting the path in quotes. – atripes Oct 06 '17 at 14:40
I have a cronjob running once a week to delete those scratch files than inevitably accumulate on the disk: find /path/to/scratch/space -mtime +60 -print -delete. So from time to time cron emails me telling me which files I just lost ... – Rolf Mar 20 '18 at 08:13
The timestamp of a folder might be older than the timestamp of file within a subfolder of that folder, i.e. in /a/b/c.txt, c.txt could be young and a old (in terms of mtime). And find could potentially find only one of them (assuming -mindepth is not set). However, -delete will not delete non-empty folders. – Rolf Jun 12 '18 at 08:52
not on Solaris. – access_granted Aug 07 '18 at 21:02
find /path/to/directory/ -mtime +5 -exec rm -rf {} ; <<- would be a SunOS version. -mindepth also doesn't work there. – access_granted Aug 07 '18 at 21:14
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Note that every find argument is a filter that uses the result of the previous filter as input. So make sure you add the -delete as the last argument. IE: find . -delete -mtime +5 will delete EVERYTHING in the current path. – Johan Jan 01 '19 at 11:39
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With option -mmin in place of -mtime, you can specify time in terms of minutes. – zyy Jan 30 '20 at 02:31
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There is no issue with using -exec rm {} \;. The pathname of the argument will be properly delimited by find, no matter what the filename is. It is not "piping to rm". This answer resolves the issue, not by using -delete, but by using a directory path as the initial search path instead of a bunch of file paths (this is not even mentioned in the answer). – Kusalananda Apr 03 '20 at 15:48
unix find command is indeed a very powerful tool – João Pimentel Ferreira Jun 21 '21 at 18:18
I found that -delete will work with very large lists of files, whereas -exec rm {} \; can fail if the list of matches is too long. – Franchesca Oct 25 '21 at 10:46

Julius · Answer 2 · 2015-11-09T10:12:55.277

23

Note that this command will not work when it finds too many files. It will yield an error like:

bash: /usr/bin/find: Argument list too long

Meaning the exec system call's limit on the length of a command line was exceeded. Instead of executing rm that way it's a lot more efficient to use xargs. Here's an example that works:

find /root/Maildir/ -mindepth 1 -type f -mtime +14 | xargs rm

This will remove all files (type f) modified longer than 14 days ago under /root/Maildir/ recursively from there and deeper (mindepth 1). See the find manual for more options.

edited Nov 09 '15 at 10:12

answered Oct 28 '15 at 17:02

Julius

466

9

Per @AfshinHamedi's answer on AskUbuntu (https://askubuntu.com/questions/589210/removing-files-older-than-7-day), be careful with files containing newlines and special characters. Instead use find /root/Maildir/ -mindepth 1 -type f -mtime +14 -print0 | xargs -r0 rm -- – Cbhihe Jul 12 '16 at 08:17
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Or just add '+' to the find results – Dani_l Apr 02 '17 at 11:07

apaul · Answer 3 · 2015-04-07T17:08:08.857

13

It's the same. You just have to provide the parent directory rather than the prefix of files. In your example, it would be:

find /path/to -type f -mtime +5 -exec rm {} \;

This will delete all the files older than 5 days which are under /path/to and its sub-directories.

To delete empty sub-directories, refer to @Costas comment above.

edited Apr 07 '15 at 17:08

answered Apr 07 '15 at 16:59

apaul

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Note that for each and every file you will execute the rm command. If you have 1000 files older than 5 days then rm will get started 1000 times. For this reason consider the -delete option as in Costa's comment or -exec rm {} + – Hennes Apr 07 '15 at 17:14
@Hennes: -- 1) not sure you need to escape + in that case. -- 2) better to write -exec rm '{}' + to fend off the evil of files with special characters (spaces, newlines, etc...) in their name. – Cbhihe Jul 12 '16 at 09:04
Note that with -exec rm {} +, if there are too many files, rm may complain: Argument list too long. So yes, -delete does seem like the much more sensible option. – mwfearnley Oct 29 '21 at 13:48

raf · Answer 4 · 2023-11-23T03:31:58.593

Disclaimer: I'm the current author of rawhide (rh) (see https://github.com/raforg/rawhide).

It probably makes the most sense to delete empty directories after deleting files that are older than X days. The modification time of directories is when entries were added or deleted from them. Deleting old files will update the modification time of the directory that contained them to the time of the deletion. So, you don't want to refer to the modification time of the directories themselves. Just delete empty directories. Deleting files at least 5 days old, and then deleting the resulting empty directories can be done with:

rh -UUU /path/to 'f && old(5*days)
rh -UUU /path/to 'd && empty'

-UUU unlinks/removes/deletes the matching files.

The rest is the search criteria.

f matches regular files.

old(5*days) matches files modified at least 5 days ago.

d matches directories.

empty matches empty directories (and regular files of zero size).

It can also be done with find, of course:

find . -type d -empty -delete

As stated by Costas.

score -1 · Answer 5 · edited Jan 16 '19 at 14:13

-1

find . -mtime +3 -type f -not -name '*pid*' |xargs rm -rf

edited Jan 16 '19 at 14:13

Jeff Schaller

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answered Jan 16 '19 at 12:12

Susil

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This seems quite unrelated to the question at hand. – Kusalananda Apr 03 '20 at 15:50

Delete files older than X days +

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