Find difference with mtime - and +
From find
's man page:
Numeric arguments can be specified as
+n for greater than n,
-n for less than n,
n for exactly n.
-mtime n
File's data was last modified n*24 hours ago. See the comments for
-atime to understand how rounding affects the interpretation of
file modification times.
-atime n
File was last accessed n*24 hours ago. When find figures out
how many 24-hour periods ago the file was last accessed, any
fractional part is ignored, so to match -atime +1, a file has to have
been accessed at least two days ago.
So, -mtime +5
will find those files last modified more than 5*24h ago and -mtime -5
will find those files last modified less than 5*24h ago. To delete files that are older than 5 days1 you would do:
find /mnt/sdb1/tmp/ -type f -mtime +5 -exec rm {} \;
If this is not returning the result you want, there may be a problem with the timestamp. Is it correctly reported for the files in question? If this is an external USB drive, the files may have been created on another machine and have a different timstamp than what you expect.
1Note that the unit here is a day, 24 hours. So more than 5 days old means at least 6 days old since the value is always rounded and fractional parts ignored.