Delete files that are older than x number of days

Question

I have a situation where I have to clean up files that are older than 7 days, but from multiple locations like below.

/home/user1/Out/vendor
/home/user2/Out/vendor
/home/user3/Out/vendor
/home/user4/Out/vendor
        ︙
/home/usern/Out/vendor

Can someone tell me how to achieve this without deleting folders? I am thinking to call there users from a text file.

Answer 1

The technique described in Delete files older than X days + will work for you:

find /path/to/directory/ -mtime +7 -delete

but it leaves out a couple of pieces of your question.

1. ... from multiple locations ...

   You can specify multiple starting points for a single find command.  Do

   find /home/user1/Out/vendor /home/user2/Out/vendor /home/user3/Out/vendor /home/user4/Out/vendor … /home/usern/Out/vendor -mtime +7 -delete

   or

   find /home/user1/Out/vendor /home/user2/Out/vendor /home/user3/Out/vendor \
        /home/user4/Out/vendor … /home/usern/Out/vendor -mtime +7 -delete

   for readability.

   But you don't have to explicitly list all the directories like that.  If you're literally dealing with user1, user2, ..., usern, (where n is a number), you can do

   find /home/user{1,2,3,4,…,n}/Out/vendor -mtime +7 -delete

   or even

   find /home/user{1..n}/Out/vendor -mtime +7 -delete

   (using literally two dots (.), a.k.a. period or full stop) in bash.

   But I guess you probably aren't literally dealing with user1, user2, ..., usern; your users probably have names.  But the same principle applies; you can do

   find /home/{user1,user2,user3,user4,…,usern}/Out/vendor -mtime +7 -delete

   For example,

   find /home/{alice,bob,cathy,david,…,nathan}/Out/vendor -mtime +7 -delete

   or even

   find ~{alice,bob,cathy,david,…,nathan}/Out/vendor -mtime +7 -delete

2. … how to achieve this without deleting folders?

   Just add -type f to the command:

   find /home/{user1,user2,user3,user4,…,usern}/Out/vendor -type f -mtime +7 -delete