Recently on one of my Ubuntu servers, I needed to delete files that were older than a week. As a general rule, this is good practice for files that you may need but after a while you won’t need them. In my case, I only needed them for at most, a week. Here is how I did it:
By using Ubuntu’s find command with a few options, will take care of what I need to do. Here is the command that I used:
find /path_to_files/* -type f -mtime +7 -exec rm -rf {} \;
OK, let me explain the syntax of the find command above:
The first part is the path that you want find to search. Wildcards are permitted, as shown in the command above.
The option -type f tells the find command to search for just files (more on this later).
The option -mtime +7 is what sets the number of days old the file needs to be. In this case, we are looking for all files older than 7 days old.
The option -exec lets me pass a command on to a new process that satisfies the find command. In this case, we want to rm -rf which recursively deletes what we want from whatever folder in the specified file path, and forces the operation.
Its very important to make sure that there are spaces between rm -rf, {}, and \; if you get an error, this is the first place to look.
Like I mentioned earlier, the -type f option just deletes files. In my situation I still had a bunch of empty directories that weren’t deleted. The solution to this is, after you have executed the above command and deleted the files, change the option to a -type d and re-run the command. This will delete the directories.
Then just place the find command into cron and set it to regularly run as you like.
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