Here’s a good one to have in your bag of tricks: all the time I wind up with a directory where I just want to delete anything older than a certain number of days. Here’s a pretty simple one:

DELETE_PATH='/var/backup/full_dumps/'
DAYS_TO_KEEP='7'

for i in `find $DELETE_PATH -ctime +$DAYS_TO_KEEP`; do
ls -lh "$i"
#rm -vf "$i"
done

The delete is commented out, so it will just list the files. Uncomment when you’re convinced it does what you want. Obviously, change the top two lines to suit your needs, and play around with find (for example, there’s an atime instead of my ctime). But it’s a handy little thing to have around and just adapt as needed.

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