I think your logic is flawed with your find example.

Code:

find . -type f | ls -ltr | head -n 10000 -exec mv {} directory/ \;

This runs the 'ls -ltr' command on ONE FILE then it runs 'head -n 10000' on that ONE FILE. And since you've passed the rest of your find command arguments (the '-exec mv {} directory/ \;' part) are being passed as arguments to the head command you're getting nowhere fast.

I suggest you pick a cutoff date for old files in that directory. Then use the find command to move those.

Something like this:

Code:

/usr/bin/find . -mtime +130 -type f -xdev -exec mv {} /some/other/dir/  \;

So here we've moved all files that haven't been modified in at least 130 days to /some/other/dir/.

The '-xdev' prevents us from searching other filesystems within the current mountpoint. If you wish to search those filesystems then simply remove the '-xdev'.

Please test your command with a different variation of the find example above before you run this on your live system to make sure it does what you expect.

Something like this perhaps:

Code:

/usr/bin/find . -mtime +130 -type f -xdev -ls

Simply shows you which files meet the criteria you specified in the find command.

And then run 'man find' and read all that.

Good Luck.