How to rm files by extension and year?

[Stacey Akerstrom]

I need to rm a ton of files for the sake of gaining back space.
The files I want to remove have an extension of .OLD, but I want to rm the ones prior to 2003 *only*.
I know it's possible, but I don't have scripting experience.

Thanks-

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

Try this:

find /dir -name '*.OLD' -mtime +285 |xargs rm


That should search from the starting directory "/dir" down, finding all files with a name ending in .OLD that haven't been touched since 285 days ago (roughly the beginning of the year, by my calculations), and removing them.


Pete

[Vitek Pepas]

find . -name "*.OLD" -mtime +`date +%j` | xargs -i rm {}
It will remove all *.OLD files created before 01/01/03.

[Pete Randall]

Stacey,

I like Vitek's solution much better - mostly because my manual date computation was off by about a month.


Pete

[Stacey Akerstrom]

Perfect, gentlemen!!!
Thanks so much.

[Vitek Pepas]

Pete is right about using '/dir' instead '.', unless you will run it from directory where your files are. But I think he got the number of days wrong - it is 258 today.

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi,

Use the find command to find these & delete them.
First use the touch command to create a file dated midnight 01/01/03 as follows:

touch -t 200301010000 /tmp/pre2003

Then use the find command using the and operator to find & remove the *.OLD files older than this.

find / \(-name "*.OLD" -a ! -newer /tmp/pre2003 \) -exec rm {} \;

HINT - Use ll in place of rm *first* to list the files before using rm JUST TO BE SURE.

HTH,
Jeff

[Jeffrey W. Stewart]

Vitek Pepas

find . -name "*.OLD" -mtime +`date +%j` | xargs -i rm {}
It will remove all *.OLD files created before 01/01/03.

Could someone explain this. I use the find and mtime option but the +`date +%j` I don't
understand. Thanks.

[Jeffrey W. Stewart]

Vitek Pepas

find . -name "*.OLD" -mtime +`date +%j` | xargs -i rm {}
It will remove all *.OLD files created before 01/01/03.

Could someone explain this. I use the find and mtime option but the +`date +%j` I don't
understand. Thanks.

[Stacey Akerstrom]

Jeffrey, I could be wrong here, but I believe it's implies using a Julian calendar...

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Jeff,

%j is the day of the year in a 3 digit number.
So Vitek is fuuneling the number of days to go *back* to the -mtime paramter using the command
date +%j

Try this command
date +%j - You should get 258 today & 259 tomorrow.

HTH,
Jeff