222

I have found the command to delete files older than 5 days in a folder

find /path/to/files* -mtime +5 -exec rm {} \;

But how do I also do this for subdirectories in that folder?

8
  • Do you mean files inside the sub directories? or the sub directories themselves?
    – rahul
    Apr 7, 2015 at 16:35
  • 3
    find /path/to -type d -empty -delete
    – Costas
    Apr 7, 2015 at 16:39
  • 2
    Delete files in subdirectories that are also 5+ days old
    – Teddy77
    Apr 7, 2015 at 16:46
  • 3
    Possibly fun when I have files with spaces. E.g a file called "test one" and rm gets fed rm test one. (Which will delete a file called "test" and a file called "one", but not a file called "test one"). Hint: -delete or -print0
    – Hennes
    Apr 7, 2015 at 17:17
  • 6
    As a side note, always quote the argument provided by find to avoid issues with special characters, as mentioned in the answer's first line. E.g.: find /path/to/files/ -exec somecommand '{}' \;
    – Walf
    Jun 17, 2016 at 1:54

4 Answers 4

397

Be careful with special file names (spaces, quotes) when piping to rm.

There is a safe alternative - the -delete option:

find /path/to/directory/ -mindepth 1 -mtime +5 -delete

That's it, no separate rm call and you don't need to worry about file names.

Replace -delete with -depth -print to test this command before you run it (-delete implies -depth).

Explanation:

  • -mindepth 1: without this, . (the directory itself) might also match and therefore get deleted.
  • -mtime +5: process files whose data was last modified 5*24 hours ago.
13
  • 38
    Also use -type f to delete files only (and keep sub directories)
    – Oleg
    Mar 4, 2016 at 8:44
  • 4
    Alternatively, if you want to do the same for all files NEWER than five days: find /path/to/directory/ -mindepth 1 -mtime -5 -delete
    – zmonteca
    Apr 19, 2016 at 17:29
  • 3
    @uom-pgregorio I would suggest putting the path in quotes.
    – atripes
    Oct 6, 2017 at 14:40
  • 36
    Note that every find argument is a filter that uses the result of the previous filter as input. So make sure you add the -delete as the last argument. IE: find . -delete -mtime +5 will delete EVERYTHING in the current path.
    – Johan
    Jan 1, 2019 at 11:39
  • 4
    With option -mmin in place of -mtime, you can specify time in terms of minutes.
    – zyy
    Jan 30, 2020 at 2:31
23

Note that this command will not work when it finds too many files. It will yield an error like:

bash: /usr/bin/find: Argument list too long

Meaning the exec system call's limit on the length of a command line was exceeded. Instead of executing rm that way it's a lot more efficient to use xargs. Here's an example that works:

find /root/Maildir/ -mindepth 1 -type f -mtime +14 | xargs rm

This will remove all files (type f) modified longer than 14 days ago under /root/Maildir/ recursively from there and deeper (mindepth 1). See the find manual for more options.

2
13

It's the same. You just have to provide the parent directory rather than the prefix of files. In your example, it would be:

find /path/to -type f -mtime +5 -exec rm {} \;

This will delete all the files older than 5 days which are under /path/to and its sub-directories.

To delete empty sub-directories, refer to @Costas comment above.

3
  • 4
    Note that for each and every file you will execute the rm command. If you have 1000 files older than 5 days then rm will get started 1000 times. For this reason consider the -delete option as in Costa's comment or -exec rm {} \+
    – Hennes
    Apr 7, 2015 at 17:14
  • @Hennes: -- 1) not sure you need to escape + in that case. -- 2) better to write -exec rm '{}' + to fend off the evil of files with special characters (spaces, newlines, etc...) in their name.
    – Cbhihe
    Jul 12, 2016 at 9:04
  • Note that with -exec rm {} +, if there are too many files, rm may complain: Argument list too long. So yes, -delete does seem like the much more sensible option.
    – mwfearnley
    Oct 29, 2021 at 13:48
-1
find . -mtime +3 -type f -not -name '*pid*' |xargs rm -rf
1
  • This seems quite unrelated to the question at hand.
    – Kusalananda
    Apr 3, 2020 at 15:50

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