How do you delete files older than specific date in Linux?

Question

I used the below command to delete files older than a year.

 find /path/* -mtime +365 -exec rm -rf {} \;

But now I want to delete all files whose modified time is older than 01 Jan 2014. How do I do this in Linux?

Best Answer

You can touch your timestamp as a file and use that as a reference point:

e.g. for 01-Jan-2014:

touch -t 201401010000 /tmp/2014-Jan-01-0000find /path -type f ! -newer /tmp/2014-Jan-01-0000 | xargs rm -rf

this works because find has a -newer switch that we're using.

From man find:

-newer fileFile was modified more recently than file. If file is a symboliclink and the -H option or the -L option is in effect, the modification time of the file it points to is always used.

This other answer pollutes the file system and find itself offers a "delete" option. So, we don't have to pipe the results to xargs and then issue an rm.

This answer is more efficient:

find /path -type f -not -newermt "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MI:SS" -delete

find ~ -type f ! -atime 4|xargs ls -lrt

This will list files accessed older than 4 days, searching from home directory.

Accepted Answer

This works for me:

find /path ! -newermt "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS" | xargs rm -rf

How do you delete files older than specific date in Linux?

Best Answer

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