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liamTc
Asked: 2012-08-22 15:54:10 +0800 CST

Find and delete directories older than time?

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I have a command which I am using to find and delete files within a directory older than a specified time. The command is:

sudo find /path/to/dir/* -daystart -mtime +7 -delete

How can I modify this command to delete directories as well as files within the specified directory.

linux

3 Answers

  1. You probably don't want to remove directories based on their modification time. What you probably want to do is remove a directory once it has no files left in it.
    One way to solve this would be the following:

    find /path/to/dir -type d -empty -exec rmdir {} \;

    If you have directories which are frequently used, but sometimes empty, you could change the command to

    find /path/to/dir -type d -empty -daystart -mtime +7 -exec rmdir {} \;

    This will only remove the directory if it doesn't match the modification time criteria, as well as it being empty.

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  2. This is the command I run to delete files:

    find /path/to/files* -mtime +1 -exec rm {} \;

    The following is untested, but I'm sure you could modify it to delete directories by doing something like this recursive delete:

    find /path/to/dir -mtime +1 -exec rm -rf {} \;
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  3. find $DNLD_DIR/* -mtime +7 -type d -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf

    removes directory without checking for empty or not. I use it for removing directories that I created with directory name as yyyymmdd and i know i want everything in it be cleaned up including directory.

    Be very careful using this, though. Any time you run find | xargs rm -rf you can ruin your day if the find conditions are wrong.

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