Find and delete non empty folder older than 3 day

Question

I want to find and delete non empty directories greater than 3 days.

find . <Path> -mtime +3 -exec rm -rf "{}" \;

I want to delete directories that have files in it and the directory and files are older than 3 days.

/tmp
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 4096 Nov  6 05:05 20191106
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 4096 Nov  7 05:05 20191107
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 4096 Nov  8 05:05 20191108
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 4096 Nov  9 05:05 20191109
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 4096 Nov 10 05:05 20191110
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 4096 Nov 11 05:05 20191111
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 4096 Nov 12 05:05 20191112
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 4096 Nov 13 05:05 20191113
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 4096 Nov 14 05:05 20191114
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 4096 Nov 15 05:05 20191115
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 4096 Nov 16 05:05 20191116
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 4096 Nov 17 05:05 20191117
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 4096 Nov 18 05:05 20191118
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 4096 Nov 19 05:05 20191119

So here greater than 3 days dir. Each directory has some text file.

Answer 1

Could be something like this:

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -not -empty -type d -mtime +3 -exec rm -rf {} \;

This solution will delete level 1 non empty directories who hasn't been touched for more than three days.

Please backup your data before testing.

Answer 2

In the zsh shell, the non-empty directories in /tmp with a modification timestamp of more than three days ago would be matching the filename globbing pattern

/tmp/*(/DNFm+3)

The glob qualifier (/DNFm+3) means

• Only match directories (/; this is not strictly needed as the F qualifier would imply the same),
• Allow matching hidden names (D; works like the dotglob shell option in bash),
• Expand to nothing if there is no match (N; works like the nullglob shell option in bash),
• Only include "full" (non-empty) directories (F),
• Only include entries that has a modification timestamp of strictly more than three days ago (m+3; for directories, this means that there was last something added or removed from the directory that many days ago; like for find's -mtime +3, that means 4 days old or older).

To list all the matches, use

print -rC1 -- /tmp/*(/DNFm+3)

To delete them, use

rm -rf -- /tmp/*(/DNFm+3)

If there are several thousands of such matches and you're running into argument list too long errors, then use a loop:

for dirpath in /tmp/*(/DNFm+3); do
    rm -rf -- $dirpath
done

Or use zargs:

autoload zargs
zargs -- /tmp/*(/DNFm+3) -- rm -rf

Or enable the rm builtin with zmodload zsh/files which will work around that limitation of the execve() system call.