OR
rm -rf `find /path/to/base/dir/* -type d -mtime +10`
Updated, faster version of it:
find /path/to/base/dir/* -mtime +10 -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f
find
supports -delete
operation, so:
find /base/dir/* -ctime +10 -delete;
I think there's a catch that the files need to be 10+ days older too. Haven't tried, someone may confirm in comments.
The most voted solution here is missing -maxdepth 0
so it will call rm -rf
for every subdirectory, after deleting it. That doesn't make sense, so I suggest:
find /base/dir/* -maxdepth 0 -type d -ctime +10 -exec rm -rf {} \;
The -delete
solution above doesn't use -maxdepth 0
because find
would complain the dir is not empty. Instead, it implies -depth
and deletes from the bottom up.
I was struggling to get this right using the scripts provided above and some other scripts especially when files and folder names had newline or spaces.
Finally stumbled on tmpreaper and it has been worked pretty well for us so far.
tmpreaper -t 5d ~/Downloads
tmpreaper --protect '*.c' -t 5h ~/my_prg
Original Source link
Has features like test, which checks the directories recursively and lists them. Ability to delete symlinks, files or directories and also the protection mode for a certain pattern while deleting
If you want to delete all subdirectories under /path/to/base
, for example
/path/to/base/dir1
/path/to/base/dir2
/path/to/base/dir3
but you don't want to delete the root /path/to/base
, you have to add -mindepth 1
and -maxdepth 1
options, which will access only the subdirectories under /path/to/base
-mindepth 1
excludes the root /path/to/base
from the matches.
-maxdepth 1
will ONLY match subdirectories immediately under /path/to/base
such as /path/to/base/dir1
, /path/to/base/dir2
and /path/to/base/dir3
but it will not list subdirectories of these in a recursive manner. So these example subdirectories will not be listed:
/path/to/base/dir1/dir1
/path/to/base/dir2/dir1
/path/to/base/dir3/dir1
and so forth.
So , to delete all the sub-directories under /path/to/base
which are older than 10 days;
find /path/to/base -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -ctime +10 | xargs rm -rf
Source: Stackoverflow.com