Delete files older than a specified period
A common administration task is to remove old, unnecessary files to prevent disk space from running out. Using find with the -exec switch you can easily achieve this and even automate the task with a cron job.
Let's start with building the criteria:
find /path/*.tmp
The above will find all files ending in .tmp at the specified path.
Add a time condition:
find /path/*.tmp -mtime +14
-mtime +14 will find files older than 14 days; -mtime +7 will find files older than 1 week.
Specify that we're looking for files only:
find /path/*.tmp -mtime +14 -type f
You can add other find switches to build your search criteria:
find /path/*.tmp -mtime +14 -type f -size -2000k
Size less than ~2MB.
find /path/*.tmp -mtime +14 -type f -size +2000k
Size more than ~2MB.
Time to do something with the files found:
find /path/*.tmp -mtime +14 -type f -exec rm {} \;
-exec Start 'exec'; rm delete; {} each file found; \; End 'exec'.
You can use rm -r to remove recursively or rm -rf to forcefully recursively.
How about a cron job to automate this task?:
00 01 * * 0 find /path/*.tmp -mtime +7 -exec rm {} \; > /dev/null 2>&1
The above example will run at 1AM every Sunday and remove every file in /path/, ending in .tmp and older than 7 days.
> /dev/null 2>&1 redirects both errors and standard to /dev/null (i.e. discards it).