UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I need a command which delete files older than 10 years.

I got a command for 90 days and all commands I find are for days and nothing for years.

Code:

find file_name -mtime +90 -exec rm {} \;

Hi eskay,

For an example to find 19 years old file:

Code:

y=19;t=`echo $y*365|bc`;find . -type f -mtime +"$t" -exec ls -l {} \;

-rwxrw-r-x   1 root       sys            695 May 10  1994 ./file1
-r-xr--r--   1 root       sys           2353 Oct 16  1993 ./file2

So your command would look like to delete 10 years old files:

Code:

find file_name -mtime +3650 -exec rm {} \;

Enjoy..

there will be a leap year in between so what then? so is there any command based on year and not on days

Of course, if you can't multiply 10 * 365 in your head but you're using a standards conforming shell (such as bash or ksh), you could also use:

Code:

find file_name -mtime +$((10 * 365)) -exec rm {} \;

without needing to start us another process to run bc.

Since it is quite possible that this find will remove applications, libraries, and data files that are used every day but haven't changed in the last decade; be sure that you only run something like this after you have made a backup of every file that might be affected... (I would strongly suggest running this with "-exec rm {} \;" replaced by "-print" first as a sanity check on what will be removed!)

Are you really worried about 2 or 3 days when you're going back a decade?

I am not worried for 2 or 3 days. It was just a requirement and so I asked. I have already done 3650 but thought to ask if there is anything similar considering years. I use an ETL tool and coding in that would take lot of time and we can put one line unix commands easily so gave it a try. Who knows how things will be after 10 years. I asked just for my knowledge

Thank you

With a POSIX conforming shell (such as bash or ksh), you could try:

Code:

touch -t $(date +"$(($(date +%Y) - 10))%m%d%H%M") __limit
find . -type f ! -newer __limit -exec ls -l {} +

to look for files 10 or more years old to the current minute. (Note that if you run it on February 29 in a leap year, the date given 10 years earlier will be on March 1.) If this does what you want, you can change the "ls -l" to "rm".

This will even work on a Solaris system where the date utility doesn't have a -d option.