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Delete all files more t han 7 days old

Terminal - Delete all files more t han 7 days old
rm -rf `find -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -mtime +7`
2009-05-22 11:46:57
User: tatwright
Functions: rm
-4
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Delete all files more t han 7 days old

This is useful for command line 'recycle bins' and such like

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There is 1 alternative - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

You could get the "arg list too long error".

Use this instead:

find -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -mtime +7 -exec rm -f {} +

or

find -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -mtime +7 | xargs rm -f
Comment by sharfah 208 weeks and 5 days ago

Quite true. Though this has never happened to me with bash on linux (only sh on windows). Also you'd need to have an awful lot of files in the top level of your tree...

Comment by tatwright 208 weeks and 4 days ago

Oooo, dangerous. Never use "rm -rf" on unescaped command lines. If there's (ugh) spaces in filenames, catastrophic things can happen. A filename with a period surrounded by space ("foo .") deletes everything under the current directory. A filename with a tilde separated by spaces ("foo ~") nukes your home directory.

Comment by sunny256 208 weeks and 4 days ago

Well, the tilde example doesn't delete the home directory in _this_ case (as the tilde isn't expanded), but there are other combinations where it could happen. In fact, for this kind of use it's better to use tmpreaper(1). It is meant for this kind of use, and it checks the access time instead of the file modification time. Because a file isn't modified in a week or so, doesn't mean it isn't used by processes in a read-only way.

Comment by sunny256 208 weeks and 4 days ago

Forget about expansion, just use find's delete capability:

find -mtime +7 -delete
Comment by bwoodacre 208 weeks and 2 days ago

@bwoodacre: does that delete dirs? and does it force delete (-f)?

Comment by sudopeople 208 weeks ago

About the "arg list too long error" :

http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/argmax/

it is quite safe since linux 2.6.23 as the arg list is valid till it doesn't fill the quarter of the stack.

Comment by log0 200 weeks and 6 days ago

Your point of view

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