This is the best practice to remove old unused files from your server. For example, if we are running daily/hourly backup of files or database 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 describe 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
You can use the find command to search all files modified older than X days. And also delete them if required in 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 above command. Once confirmed, you are good to go to delete those files with following command.
find /opt/backup -type f -mtime +30 -delete
2. Delete Files with Specific Extension
Instead of deleting all files, you can also add more filters to find command. For example, you only need to delete files with “.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 file by running the following command:
find /var/log -name "*.log" -type f -mtime +30 -delete
Above command will delete only files having .log extension and last modification date is older than 30 days.
3. Delete Old Directory Recursively
Using the -delete option may fail, if the directory is not empty. In that case we will use Linux rm command with find command.
The below command will search all directories modified before 90 days under the /var/log directory.
find /var/log -type d -mtime +90
Here we can execute the rm command using -exec command line option. Find command output will be send to rm command as input.
find /var/log -type d -mtime +30 -exec rm -rf {} \;
Conclusion
In this tutorial, you have learned to search and delete files modified older than specific days in Linux command line.
14 Comments
How do I write a script and scheduled to run monthly to delete backup files (x.tar.gz) 2-months old on located on /snap folder in a Red Hat Linux server?
#!/bin/bash
find /mnt/backup/backup -name “*.x.tar.gz” -type f -mtime “+$(( ( $(date ‘+%s’) – $(date -d ‘2 months ago’ ‘+%s’) ) / 86400 ))” -exec rm -f {} \;
#Use crontab to schedule as required
find /mnt/backup/backup -name “*.x.tar.gz” -type f -mtime “+$(( ( $(date ‘+%s’) – $(date -d ‘2 months ago’ ‘+%s’) ) / 86400 ))”
Returns errors:
date: invalid date ‘‘+%s\’’
date: extra operand ‘ago\’’
Any idea?
How do I write a script and scheduled to run monthly to delete backup files (x.tar.gz) on /snap folder in a Red Hat Linux server?
could just add the -delete flag rather than piping to rm
This only removes the files. What if you have a sub folders and you also want to delete these. What do you do then ?
How to delete files/folders from a directory older than a certain date?
Ex:- Delete all files and folders from a specified path older than 01-Jan-2018
How to find and delete files older than 90 days in linux?
Find has a ‘-delete’ option. You don’t need ‘-exec’ for that.
How to pass multiple files in name variable
example: -name “*.log”, “errorfile” , “result*”….
find: missing argument to `-exec’
Hi Adhir, Tutorial has been updated.
I get the same error.
Command:
find /volume1/DeleteOldBackUps_TEST/Dest_Old/test-02/ -type f -mtime +31 -exec rm {} \;
The situation could be frustrating and can go a long way to slowing down your system’s
speed. What do you do at this time? There is need to delete those unnecessary files.