In bash, how do I delete child directories older than the date that another directory was created?

Question

I can use the following command to delete child directories in a particular directory older than x number of days

find /path/to/base/dir/* -type d -ctime +10 -exec rm -rf {} \;

but how would I delete child directories that were older than the date when another dirctory was created? I know I can get the date using

$ ls -l /var/www/cfs-web/current
lrwxrwxrwx 1 myuser mygroup 41 Feb 22 23:19 /path/to/main/dir

but I’m not sure how to combine this with the above.

Answer 1

how would I delete child directories that were older than the date when another dirctory was created?

There is unlikely to be a created date or birth date attribute for files/directories.

If the last modified time will suffice, you can simply change ctime +10 to ! -newer reference where 'reference' is the directory whose modification time you want to use as a reference.

If your system does store birth date file attributes, you could use ! -newerBB reference.