How To Find and Delete Files Older Than X Days in Linux

It’s always recommended to find and cleanup your old files which are no longer necessary after a certain period of time.

This will save you some disk space. This brief tutorial walks you through how to find and delete files older than X days in Linux and Unix-like operating systems.

Note You should be extremely careful while running the following commands. These commands will not ask you any confirmation before deleting the files. It will simply delete the files once you hit the key. So be very careful and double check the files you're about to delete.

Find Files Older Than X Days In Linux

First, let’s find out the files older than X days, for example 30 days.

The below command will find and display the older files which are older than 30 days in the current working directory.

find . -mtime +30 -print

dot (.) – Represents the current directory.
-mtime – Represents the file modification time and is used to find files older than 30 days.
-print – Displays the older files

The files older than 30 days in the current directory.

[root@kms log]# find . -mtime +30 -print
./tallylog
./grubby_prune_debug
./samba
./samba/old
./secure-20220828
./tuned
./tuned/tuned.log
./audit
./audit/audit.log.2
./audit/audit.log.1
./audit/audit.log

If you want to search files in a specific directory, just replace the dot with the folder path. For example, to find out the files which are older than 30 days in nginx log directory /var/log/nginx.

find /var/log/nginx -mtime +30 -print

[root@kms log]# find /var/log/nginx -mtime +30 -print
/var/log/nginx/error.log-20220908.gz
/var/log/nginx/error.log-20220909.gz
/var/log/nginx/error.log-20220911.gz
/var/log/nginx/access.log-20220912.gz
/var/log/nginx/error.log-20220916.gz
/var/log/nginx/access.log-20220909.gz
/var/log/nginx/access.log-20220911.gz
/var/log/nginx/error.log-20220912.gz

Delete Files Older Than X Days In Linux

Now, run the following command to delete the files which are not required anymore. Again, I warn you that these commands will delete the files immediately once you hit button. Please be cautious and double check before running these commands.

find /var/log/nginx -type f -mtime +30 | xargs rm -f

Once done, when you run the command to find the files older than 30 days in nginx log directory. There’s nothing returned.

Alternatively, you can use one of below commands to find then delete files older than 30 days in a directory in Linux.

find /var/log/nginx -mtime +30 -exec rm -f {} \;
find /var/log/nginx -mtime +30 -delete;

Conclusion

Delete old files periodically if they are not necessary at regular intervals, or backup them to any external drives and free up disk space. You can use the free space for any other useful purposes.