Linux Delete File or Folder Older than x Days

Hi Dude, this article will simply describe about script linux delete folder or file older than x days. I have directories named as:

2012-12-12
2012-10-12
2012-08-08

How would delete the directories that are older than 10 days with a bash shell script? This will do it recursively for you:

Delete Folder Older Than X Days

Here is simple command.

find /path/to/base/dir/* -type d -ctime +10 -exec rm -rf {} \;

Explanation:

• find: the unix command for finding files / directories / links etc.
• /path/to/base/dir: the directory to start your search in.
• -type d: only find directories
• -ctime +10: only consider the ones with modification time older than 10 days
• -exec ... \;: for each such result found, do the following command in ...
• rm -rf {}: recursively force remove the directory; the {} part is where the find result gets substituted into from the previous part.

Alternatively, use:

find /path/to/base/dir/* -type d -ctime +10 | xargs rm -rf

Which is a bit more efficient, because it amounts to:

rm -rf dir1 dir2 dir3 ...

as opposed to:

rm -rf dir1; rm -rf dir2; rm -rf dir3; ...

as in the -exec method.

With modern versions of find, you can replace the ; with + and it will do the equivalent of the xargs call for you, passing as many files as will fit on each exec system call:

find . -type d -ctime +10 -exec rm -rf {} +

Delete File Older Than X Days

Next, how to method to delete old file?

For example, i have web with code igniter framework. I want to clear ci_session file that dumping to /tmp file.

user@server01 ~# ls -al /tmp/

-rw-------   1 user user 86 Sep 26 22:14 ci_sessionc7a2272efaa08e4bc16
-rw-------   1 user user 86 Sep 27 01:32 ci_sessionc7a2298b92dd8562344
-rw-------   1 user user 86 Sep 26 12:54 ci_sessionc7a2dca33a348890618
-rw-------   1 user user 34 Sep 27 00:37 ci_sessionc7a3fd9ef972a0921fd
...
...

Here is simple way to do it.

find /tmp/ -type f -name 'ci_session*' -ctime +0 -exec rm -rf {} \;
or
find /tmp/ -type f -name 'ci_session*' -exec rm -rf {} \;

That is simple tips to linux script delete folder and file older than x days. That command run in linux/unix. What if we wanti delete file folder older than x day in windows? Here is the article.

May be it’s helpful, please feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions and I’ll appreciate it.

_{source : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13868821/shell-script-to-delete-directories-older-than-n-days}