How to delete all the files which are not created today

Question

I want to delete all the files in a folder which are not created today. I know how to get the list of files which are created today using

find . -type f -mtime -1

But, I am not getting how to get the list of all files which are not created today. Basically I have to find if there are files with old timestamp except today in a folder. If present I have to delete only the old files.

Answer 1

find . -type f -mtime +0 -exec rm -f {} +

or

find . -type f ! -mtime -1 -exec rm -f {} +

Would remove the regular files whose content has been last modified more than 24 hours ago (-mtime +0 meaning: whose age in days (rounded down to an integer, days are 24 hours, or 86400 Unix epoch second duration) is strictly greater than 0).

Some find implementations have a -delete predicate which you can use in place of -exec rm -f {} + which would make it safer and more efficient.

For files that have been last modified earlier than today 00:00:00, with GNU find, you can add the -daystart predicate. That will include the files that were last modified yesterday even if less than 24 hours ago.

With some find implementations, you can also do:

find . ! -newermt 00:00:00 -delete

To delete files that have been last modified before (or at exactly) 00:00:00 today.

Answer 2

Using zsh, either natively or via zsh -c "...":

rm -f /path/to/folder/*(.m+0)     # for that directory only

rm -f /path/to/folder/**/*(.m+0)  # recursively

The parens ( ... ) creates a zsh "glob qualifier". Inside there, a dot . specifies plain files (similar to find's -type f) and the m+0 requires that the file have a modification time that is strictly more than zero days ago, after truncating down to whole days — 23 hours is 0 days; 25 hours would be 1 day.

To even more closely match find's default behavior of finding/matching "hidden" files (that start with a dot), add the capital D qualifier:

rm -f /path/to/folder/*(D.m+0)     # for that directory only

rm -f /path/to/folder/**/*(D.m+0)  # recursively

Answer 3

find has the parameter -not or ! which negates the one after and -delete to delete the files:

find . ! -mtime -1 -type f -delete

Note that -not is not POSIX compliant

Answer 4

When the number of old files than a day is of large amount, I do the below just to be thorough. Get the number of files per day:

$ find . -type f -printf '%TY-%Tm-%Td\n' | sort | uniq -c
# Output:
  42315 2020-09-29
  42315 2020-09-30
  42315 2020-10-01
  42315 2020-10-02
  42315 2020-10-03
  42315 2020-10-04
  42315 2020-10-05
   2275 2020-10-06

And to delete all files older than current day:

$ find . -mindepth 1 -type f -mtime +0 | xargs /bin/rm -f
## Now to check the count again.
$ find . -type f -printf '%TY-%Tm-%Td\n' | sort | uniq -c
   2275 2020-10-06

Not sure why, but I find that using -exec rm takes a lot of time while piping xargs is quicker.