In a directory there are files which are generated daily.
Format of files, if its generated on 16th Apr 2012 is TEST_20120416.txt.

So I need to delete all the files which are older than 7 days. I tried doing this

#!/bin/ksh
find /data/Test/*.* -mtime +7 -exec rm -rf {} \;
exit 0

That will be a problem as most unixes don't store the file creation time, and it's not specified in POSIX either.

Use

stat <FILE>

find -newerBt <REFERENCE_TIME_STAMP> -exec ...

Hi,

Unix doesnt support birth row.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. POSIX enforces ctime, mtime and atime, but birth time is not mentioned anywhere. Some versions of the stat(1) command will give you this row though, and many versions of find can deal with it too, but if the birth time cannot be obtained all checks will always fail.

AFAIK, the only unix that does support birth time is FreeBSD.

Please post what Operating System and version you are running.


Did the command delete the wrong files? Did the command delete any files? As presented the pattern *.* does not match your filenames because there is no period in the name of the file. This is unix not MSDOS and there is no special meaning to the period character in filenames and no special meaning to file extensions (like .txt) beyond accepted convention.
Also surely you mean +7 (older) not -7 (newer) !

Try experimenting with command structure like this to see what might be deleted:

#!/bin/ksh
find /data/Test -type f -name 'TEST_*' -mtime +7 -print | while read filename
do
        # Remove echo when tested
        echo rm -f "${filename}"
done

btrfs, zfs, ext4 and hfs+ also store file creation time.