How to Delete Folders Older than 7 Days in Ubuntu

System administrators often need to delete files & folders older than X days on their system. In this article, we will learn how to delete folders older than 7 days in Ubuntu. You can use these steps to delete files & folders older than any number of days as per your requirement. You can also use these steps on almost any Linux distribution.

How to Delete Folders Older than 7 Days in Ubuntu

Here are the steps to delete folders older than 7 days in Ubuntu. You can easily do this using find command. Here is the command to delete files & folders in /data/ folder, that are older than 7 days.

$ find /data/* -mtime +7 -exec rm {} \;

The first argument is the path to folder whose content you want to delete. It can be relative or absolute path, and can contain wildcard characters like *. Next option is -mtime that stands for last modified time. If we enter +7 after -mtime, find command will look for all files older than 7 days.

The third argument -exec is used to execute any specific Linux command, on the files that have been found as a result of find command. We mention rm {} to delete all files older than 7 days, in /data/ folder.

If you want to delete only folders, add type -d option to find folders, and use rmdir command.

$ find /data/*/* -mtime +7 -type d -exec rmdir {} \;

If you want to delete both files & folders, use rm -r command.

$ find /data/*/* -mtime +7 -type d -exec rm -r {} \;

If you want to create cronjob just open crontab with the following command.

$ crontab -e

Add the following line to run the above find command every day at 10.A.M.

0 10 * * * find /data/*/* -mtime +7 -type d -exec rm -r {} \; >/dev/null 2>&1

Save and close the file. You can easily generate cronjob commands using an online crontab generator.

In this article, we have learnt how to find & delete files & folders older than 7 days in Linux.

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