UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Using the find command to find files in a directory and automatically delete files older than 24 hours

Code:

find . -mtime +0 | grep file | xargs rm

. Using the find man page but I can't seem to make it work for files that have the previous day's time stamp but are not 24 hours old. Is there a way for find to find files using the date and time stamp? Thanks.

If that's really what you want, it's the simplest thing in the world -- trash the entire folder daily at midnight. The exact instant the day changes, every file in it will have yesterday's timestamp, guaranteed.

Of course, this means a file which got updated 3 seconds before midnight would be yesterday's file and summarily trashed... Find's behavior is probably more sensible.

You do not need to do find | grep, find has its own features for matching. Also, find | xargs can be unreliable if any of your filenames contain spaces or quotes. Many systems will allow you to use -exec, terminated with '+', to get the same benefit as xargs -- multiple files put into one command -- without the problems.

Code:

find . -mtime +0 -type f -name '*file*' -exec echo rm '{}' '+'

Yeah, it's a lot easier to just delete those files daily. Cheers!

Corona, your find would also delete the files from today!
But with the following trick you can delete all files with a yesterdays time stamp (and older):

Code:

touch -t `date +%Y%m%d0000` day.start
find .  -type f -name '*file*' \! -newer day.start -exec echo rm {} +

You're right, the + is important.

But that's why I put the 'echo' in these things. Always test with that first.