Question

Does anyone have a good shell line for this?

I want to check the age on a directory. If I created multiple directories on a weekly basis and I want to purge them/delete them based on 7 days later for example.

How would I do that?

Answer 1

This will let you do a dry run, remove the echo if you like the output

find /path/to/toplevel -type d -mtime +7 -exec echo rm -rf {} +

Update

If you have an older version of find that doesn’t comply with POSIX 2004 then use this instead:

find /path/to/toplevel -type d -mtime +7 -exec echo rm -rf {} \;

or

find /path/to/toplevel -type d -mtime +7 -print0 | xargs -0 echo rm -rf {}

The former terminated by \; will call rm for each directory it finds, the latter with xargs will attempt to call rm as few times as possible by passing multiple directories to a single call to rm and thus be much faster. The latter also has identical behavior to the first one terminated with a +