Shell Programming and Scripting

I want my script to check directories and files within the directories older than 7days lold and remove them but the script only removes the directories older than 7 days.

Code:

find home/prod/clt/nal/inb -mtime +7 -exec rm -rf {} \;

The inb contains multiple directories that contain multiple files.
I'm not sure why the find command does not work as I intended.

find is recursive, so your rm doesn't have to be.

You shouldn't depend on the modification time of the directory anyway, since I think that relates to when files were created/deleted, not when files inside it were modified.

So search for files only find /path -type f and rm without the -r.

If you really need to, you can do another pass to remove empty directories afterwards.

Another thing you can try is to add the -depth switch. It'll force the find comand to test files before directories. The effect being that if a directory contains files that do not meet the criteria, then the files that do will be removed, but the directory will not.

From the man page:

Code:

-depth Process each directory's contents before the directory itself.

Hope this helps.