Question

I noticed today (after ~8 years of happily hacking away at bash) that there is no trivial way to ‘delete by date’ using ´rm’. The solution is therefore to pipe stuff around a combination of commands like rm, ls, find, awk and sed.

Say for example I wanted to delete every file in the working directory from 2009, what would be the typical approach?

I came up with the following, which is butt-ugly and should only be run if ‘rm’ is set to skip over directories (otherwise you will delete the parent directory):

ls -la | awk '{if (substr($6,0,5)==2009) print $8}' | xargs rm 

Points for both the most elegant and the most outrageously over-engineered solutions.

Answer 1

Some versions of find support the -delete option, making it even more efficient…

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -ctime -12 -delete; 

Check your find man page (this has worked on most recent releases of Ubuntu for me)