While I agree with what bakunin said in post #5 in this thread, note that the find -newermt primary is not in the standards either.

This is why you are always asked to tell us the operating system and shell you're using when posting a thread in the UNIX for Beginners Questions and Answers forum. If we don't know what environment you're using, you're likely to get suggestions that won't work in your environment. Since what drysdalk suggested works in your environment, we will assume that you're currently using a BSD-based or GNU-based find utility. If you had been using a traditional UNIX system, you'd have gotten an error about the unknown primary -newermt.

Since -newermt worked, -delete will also probably work and will probably be slightly faster than -exec rm -fv '{}' +. (The difference between the speed of -delete and -exec rm -fv '{}' + will be MUCH smaller than the difference between -exec rm -fv '{}' + and -exec rm -fv '{}' \;.)

Doing this in a manner just using standard features (and a little more accurately setting the start and end points) would require something more like:

Code:

trap 'rm -rf $$.start $$.end' EXIT
touch -d 2016-12-31T23:59:59.999999999 $$.start
touch -d 2017-12-31T23:59:59.999999999 $$.end
find /path/to/files -type f -newer $$.start ! -newer $$.end -exec rm -rf '{}' +

Note, however, that the timestamps being used here accurately reflect the end points you want to the nearest nanosecond (which is the timestamp precision stored in a standard stat structure), but there is a reasonable likelihood that the last record entered into a logfile at the end of a year will not actually be written to that logfile until a few milliseconds (or even seconds) into the next year. And, that last write into the logfile will determine the last modified timestamp of that file; not the string specifying the date in the name of the logfile. (And this problem affects all of the methods we have talked about when using find -newer and -newermt. So beware that find may be doing exactly what you asked it to do, but it might not be exactly what you wanted it to do.

And, if anyone edits a logfile, the modification time of that file may be years later than the name of the file would indicate!

I hope this further clarification helps you understand the limitations on what you're doing.