To do this at the command line for, say, 30 days, the following will do the trick:
find /path/to/dir -name "*.log" -mtime -30 -exec -rm {} \;
- where /path/to/dir is just that, the path to the target directory
- “*.log” will only delete files of a specified extension however you can apply any filter you like
- the -exec switch is very handy when used in conjunction with ‘find’ – in fact you can feed the output of your search to any other command you like, same idea as pipe ‘|’
- if this is your first time you may wish to try the less destructive -exec mv -f {} ./tmp \;
- all statements of this type must terminate with ‘\;’ this closes the statement and escapes the final semi-colon
October 2nd, 2002 at 9:31 am
for the faint of heart you can require a confirmation before each delete:
find . -name “*.old” -ok rm {} \;
June 30th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Also very handy for when the /tmp directory is not automatically cleaning PHP session files older than 30 days:
find /tmp/ -name “sess_*” -mtime +30 -exec mv -f {} /root/tmp \;
I moved them outside the /tmp dir so they didn’t get found twice, and to verify date before deletion.