Shell script to delete directories older than n days

find supports -delete operation, so:

find /base/dir/* -ctime +10 -delete;

I think there's a catch that the files need to be 10+ days older too. Haven't tried, someone may confirm in comments.

The most voted solution here is missing -maxdepth 0 so it will call rm -rf for every subdirectory, after deleting it. That doesn't make sense, so I suggest:

find /base/dir/* -maxdepth 0  -type d -ctime +10 -exec rm -rf {} \;

The -delete solution above doesn't use -maxdepth 0 because find would complain the dir is not empty. Instead, it implies -depth and deletes from the bottom up.


If you want to delete all subdirectories under /path/to/base, for example

/path/to/base/dir1
/path/to/base/dir2
/path/to/base/dir3

but you don't want to delete the root /path/to/base, you have to add -mindepth 1 and -maxdepth 1 options, which will access only the subdirectories under /path/to/base

-mindepth 1 excludes the root /path/to/base from the matches.

-maxdepth 1 will ONLY match subdirectories immediately under /path/to/base such as /path/to/base/dir1, /path/to/base/dir2 and /path/to/base/dir3 but it will not list subdirectories of these in a recursive manner. So these example subdirectories will not be listed:

/path/to/base/dir1/dir1
/path/to/base/dir2/dir1
/path/to/base/dir3/dir1

and so forth.

So , to delete all the sub-directories under /path/to/base which are older than 10 days;

find /path/to/base -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -ctime +10 | xargs rm -rf

This will do it recursively for you:

find /path/to/base/dir/* -type d -ctime +10 -exec rm -rf {} \;

Explanation:

  • find: the unix command for finding files / directories / links etc.
  • /path/to/base/dir: the directory to start your search in.
  • -type d: only find directories
  • -ctime +10: only consider the ones with modification time older than 10 days
  • -exec ... \;: for each such result found, do the following command in ...
  • rm -rf {}: recursively force remove the directory; the {} part is where the find result gets substituted into from the previous part.

Alternatively, use:

find /path/to/base/dir/* -type d -ctime +10 | xargs rm -rf

Which is a bit more efficient, because it amounts to:

rm -rf dir1 dir2 dir3 ...

as opposed to:

rm -rf dir1; rm -rf dir2; rm -rf dir3; ...

as in the -exec method.

With modern versions of find, you can replace the ; with + and it will do the equivalent of the xargs call for you, passing as many files as will fit on each exec system call:

find . -type d -ctime +10 -exec rm -rf {} +

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