Is there a command to delete all the files in a directory that haven’t been modified in N days? I need to clean up some old logs.
Answers:
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Method 1
This will delete all files older than 5 days, you can put a -name '*log' in there too to be more precise and you might want to specify a maxdepth in the find command too.
find /some/dir -type f -mtime +5 -delete
Method 2
With zsh and (.m+n) glob qualifiers: . selects only regular files, m+n selects files modified more than n days ago;
e.g. list the files in the current directory that were modified more than 9 days ago:
print -rl -- *(.m+9)
add D to include dot files:
print -rl -- *(D.m+9)
or if you want to recurse (and list e.g. only files ending with .log):
setopt extendedglob print -rl -- **/*.log(.m+9)
replace print -rl with rm if you’re happy with the result; though you may have to use zargs if you have many files (to avoid arguments list too long):
autoload zargs zargs ./**/*(.m+9) -- rm
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