How to Delete Files Older Than X Days Automatically in Linux

In this article I will show example of cronjob for Linux to delete files older than 10 days.

Edit the crontab file

To edit or create new crontab file, type the following command:

crontab -e

Cronjob to delete files older than X days

In crontab editor, add the following line:

0 0 * * * /usr/bin/find /target_directory -name "*.txt" -type f -mtime +10 -exec rm -f {} \;

Change /target_directory and “*.txt” as you need.

Cron expression 0 0 * * * means cron job will run every day at 12:00 AM.

An example, we’ll delete all nginx log files older than 10 days.

0 0 * * * /usr/bin/find /var/log/nginx -name "*.log*" -type f -mtime +10 -exec rm -f {} \;

Each line of a crontab file represents a job, and looks like this:

# ┌───────────── minute (0 - 59)
# │ ┌───────────── hour (0 - 23)
# │ │ ┌───────────── day of the month (1 - 31)
# │ │ │ ┌───────────── month (1 - 12)
# │ │ │ │ ┌───────────── day of the week (0 - 6) (Sunday to Saturday;
# │ │ │ │ │                                   7 is also Sunday on some systems)
# │ │ │ │ │
# │ │ │ │ │
# * * * * * <command to execute>

You can read more about cronjob