How to Delete Files Older than 30 days in Linux

Regularly cleaning out old unused files from your server is the best practice. For example, if we are running a daily/hourly backup of files or databases on the server then there will be much junk created on the server. So clean it regularly. To do it you can find older files from the backup directory and clean them.

This article describes you to how to find and delete files older than 30 days. Here 30 days older means the last modification date is before 30 days.

1. Delete Files older Than 30 Days

Using the find command, you can search for and delete all files that have been modified more than X days. Also, if required you can delete them with a single command.

First of all, list all files older than 30 days under /opt/backup directory.

find /opt/backup -type f -mtime +30 

Verify the file list and make sure no useful file is listed in the above command. Once confirmed, you are good to go to delete those files with the following command.

find /opt/backup -type f -mtime +30 -delete 

2. Delete Files with Specific Extension

You can also specify more filters to locate commands rather than deleting all files. For example, you can only delete files with the “.log” extension and modified before 30 days.

For the safe side, first, do a dry run and list files matching the criteria.

find /var/log -name "*.log" -type f -mtime +30 

Once the list is verified, delete those files by running the following command:

find /var/log -name "*.log" -type f -mtime +30 -delete 

The above command will delete only files with a .log extension and with the last modification date older than 30 days.

3. Delete Old Directory Recursively

The -delete option may fail if the directory is not empty. In that case, we will use the Linux rm command with find to accomplish the deletion.

Searching all the directories under /var/log modified before 90 days using the command below.

find /var/log -type d -mtime +90 

Here we can execute the rm command using -exec command line option. Find command output will be sent to rm command as input.

find /var/log -type d -mtime +30 -exec rm -rf {} \; 

Conclusion

You have learned how to find and delete files in the Linux command line that have been modified more than a specified number of days ago. That will help you clean up your system from unwanted files.