Posts Tagged ‘find’

I found the F (-mtime +3)!

forgetting is the bane of my existence. don’t ask why. i’ve forgotten this syntax enough times that i should have it tattooed on my upper arm. in fact, I think i’ve posted it on my own site before and forgotten about that.

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

the first argument is, of course, the path to the files that you’re looking to rid yourself. The first flag, -mtime, tells find to look for files older than a certain number of days. the whole “+5″ would indicate five days from today (would -5 be five days in the future then? something to look up later). The second flag, -exec, will tell find to execute the following command when it gets a positive result. in this case, we’re “removing” (rm

i will say though that i should really read the man page a little better to get this straight. this particular command has yielded some strange results at times, and i’m at a loss as to why being that it’s SO straight forward. maybe i’ll just post the man page here for shits and giggles.

BASH: deleting files older than X number of days

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

A handy utility to stick into the old brain. Thank you, internet, for providing me such a vast and available resource so that I know longer have to rely on my own faculty of memory.