Delete files that are x days old

Sometimes in Linux, you want to clear out older files in a directory. One instance would be if you have a security system and it continuously writes video files to a directory on your NAS (Network Attached Storage) until it fills it up. You’ve figured out that if you keep a week’s worth of video, it will usually leave plenty of space for other users.

What I would suggest here is creating a cron job that runs every night and runs something like the following command:

find /path/to/files/ -type f -mtime +7 -exec rm -rf {} \;

1	find /path/to/files/ -type f -mtime +7 -exec rm -rf {} \;

What it all means:
find: the command that will search for the files
/path/to/files/: the top level directory to start searching
-type f: so we don’t remove directories, only files
-mtime +7: files older than ‘7’ days. Change to ‘+14’ to delete files older than 2 weeks.
-exec: what to do with the files we find
rm -rf: remove them recursively, force
{}: this represents each file we find
\;: the end of the exec

SO – the crontab entry would be this:

0 2 * * * /bin/find /path/to/files/ -type f -mtime +7 -exec rm -rf {} \;

1	0 2 * * * /bin/find /path/to/files/ -type f -mtime +7 -exec rm -rf {} \;

This will run every night at 2am.

5 responses to Delete files that are x days old

joe chan September 9, 2013 at 11:07 am

Finally….I can free up so much space from my Linux now. I’m relatively new to Linux so 90% of the time I have no idea what I’m doing haha. Thanks for posting this.

Sly14Cat September 14, 2013 at 12:32 pm

Wow this is a great use of the cron job. I’m definitely keeping this command because it’d be great for any type of server that keeps old files or constant backups. For example a Minecraft server that does backups every hour. Then you could have it delete all saves older than few days or a week. Not to mention how useful this could be for managing all sorts of backups. Bookmarked for sure.

eoinboyler September 14, 2013 at 12:39 pm

Thanks so much for posting this,

It has helped me out so much,

I’ve freed up so much space thanks to you.

Eoin

rg83 September 28, 2013 at 1:44 am

This looks incredibly useful! I’ve wanted to be able to do something like this before, but I didn’t realize it was actually possible. I should’ve realized it was. Linux is awesome like that.

Mursel January 14, 2015 at 1:18 pm

I like the fact that you explained each entry in the command so that anyone can modify accordingly.

Thanks