Deleting files older than a given date

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi all,

I want to delete all files in a directory which are older than a given date.

I thought of doing it by creating a file by the required date by using touch command. And then i would use find command on that file and try to find files older than that.

I searched the man and found a newer option for find command.
But i didn't get the opposite of it (i would like to find older files)

Can anyone please tell me the easiest way to do that?

Thanks in advance,
raju

2

Read your "find" man page carefully and see if "-mtime +3" is the opposite of "-mtime -3". It is in some newer versions of find, and you may have one.

This is a case where posting the result of "uname -sr" or something similar would allow those with specialized knowledge to help more.

3

you could use the find command

eg

find /my_current_directory -mtime +5 -exec rm {} \;

Note
To find files created more than 5 days use -mtime +5
To find files created less than 5 days use -mtime -5

4

If there are a lot of these files, you'll save time with

find /my_current_directory -mtime +5 -print | xargs rm

I.e., invoke "rm" on large groups of files --- frequently only once.