Shell script to delete directories older than n days

Question

I have directories named as   2012-12-12 2012-10-12 2012-08-08   How would I delete the directories that are older than 10 days with a bash shell script

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

This will do it recursively for you   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

User · Answer

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

[bash] Shell script to delete directories older than n days

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