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I'd like to run a nightly cron job that deletes all the files in a folder that haven't been accessed in a week or more. What is the most efficient way to do this in bash?

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find can filter based on atime. The "correctness" of atime depends upon configuration (see noatime), at the very least. – pst Jul 12 '11 at 23:40

migrated from stackoverflow.com Jul 13 '11 at 1:01

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up vote 15 down vote accepted

You want the find tool.

find folder -depth -type f -atime +7 -delete

(This will delete all files (only regular ones, no pipes, special devices, directories, symbolic links) in the given folder and all subdirectories (recursively) where the last access time is longer than 7 days ago.)

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You might want to add -type f in there to ensure it only deletes files, not entire directories. – Shadur Jul 13 '11 at 4:42
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You may want to check out tmpwatch which can be put into a cron job. No need to roll-your-own with find. On RHEL it's in the tmpwatch RPM.

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This is definitely the more elegant solution, but I prefer the portability of find. – Bloudermilk Jul 15 '11 at 3:21

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