hi, thanks for all your replies.
dmwaff, apologies for any misunderstanding, what i wanted was to find the contents 30+ days old only in the print directory and not its subdirectory "backup"
i tried :
find /local/home/*username*/print/ -name print -prune -o -mtime +30
and it returns everything 30+ days old in 'print' and in the sub directory 'backup'.
i tried:
find . -prune -mtime +30
and it doesn't return anything even with a -ls option at the end.
i went back one directory into my username directory and tried the following commands
find . -name 'print' -mtime +30
find ./ -name print -mtime +30
but nothing, no display or error message of incorrect usage even with an -ls or -prune option. I did a check on the contents of the directory and there are files dating back from 2006, from May and June 2007, which it should pick up and display