Bash script to delete files older than x days with subdirectories

type option for filtering results

find accepts the type option for selecting, for example, only files.

find /path/to/files -type f -mtime +10 -delete

Leave out -delete to show what it'd delete, and once you've verified that, go ahead and run the full command.

That would only run on files, not directories. Use -type d for the inverse, only listing directories that match your arguments.

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Additional options

You might want to read man find, as there are some more options you could need in the future. For example, -maxdepth would allow you to only restrict the found items to a specific depth, e.g. -maxdepth 0 would not recurse into subdirectories.

Some remarks

• I wonder how the command would have removed a folder, since you can't remove a folder with rm only. You'd need rm -r for that.

• Also, /path/to/files* is confusing. Did you mean /path/to/files/ or are you expecting the wildcard to expand to several file and folder names?

• Put the {} in single quotes, i.e. '{}' to avoid the substituted file/directory name to be interpreted by the shell, just like we protect the semicolon with a backslash.

As in previous answers (+1 for both) the trick is to use -type f predicate.

Note, that instead of -exec rm '{}' you can also use -delete predicate. But don't do that. With -exec rm '{}' you can (and should) first do -exec echo rm '{}' to verify that this is really what do you want. After that rerun the command without the echo.

Using -delete is faster (no extra fork() and execve() for each file), but this is risky because -delete works also as a condition, so:

# delete *.tmp files
find . -type f -name '*.tmp' -delete

but if you ONLY swap arguments:

# delete ALL files
find . -type f -name '*.tmp' -delete

If you ever need find and rm to work faster for tons of files, check out the find ... | xargs ... rm UNIX idiom.