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akko
Asked: 2020-07-12 07:59:14 +0800 CST 2020-07-12 07:59:14 +0800 CST

Find and delete files less than n number of days old

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I need to remove jpg files from within a directory tree, but I only need to remove files that are less than n days old. Eg Delete jpg images that are 3 days or less from being created.

This is what I have so far but it doesn't work:

$ find ~/la/ruta -name *.jpg -mtime -2 -exec rm {} \;
zsh: no matches found: *.jpg

$ find la/ruta/*.jpg -mtime -2 -exec rm {} \; 
zsh: no matches found: la/ruta/*.jpg
linux

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I have done the installation of zsh, and when trying to reproduce your problem, indeed, it throws the same error.

    zsh: no matches found: *.jpg

    Generally, when using the parameter -nameor -inamein the command find, quotes are used, be they single or double. Leaving the command like this:

    find /ruta/carpeta/ -name "*.jpg" -mtime -2 -exec rm {} \;

    You can also use -iname, in case any of the files have the extension .JPG. Since it -inameignores if they are uppercase or lowercase.

    Regarding the creation date , we could look at an example:

    1) We create a file.

    touch archivo.txt

    2) Let's look at the date.

    ls -lh

    We get this result:

    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jul 12 08:33 file.txt

    3) We add some information to the file.

    echo "Hola mundo" > archivo.txt

    4) Let's look at the date again.

    ls -lh

    We get this result:

    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11 Jul 12 08:34 file.txt

    The creation date is not a data that can be accessed according to the POSIX standard , since it defines 3 dates for a file, according to this documentation .

    And in this Stack Exchange question , I quote:

    The POSIX standard only defines three distinct timestamps to be stored for each file: the time of last data access, the time of last data modification, and the time the file status last changed.

    Whose main idea in Spanish, means:

    The POSIX standard defines three save dates for each file, the date of last access, the date of last modification, and the date the file was last changed.

    What gives us to understand that if the file is modified, it will be very difficult to search for it and delete it by date of creation.

    Conclusion

    To delete the files with less than N days , it would suffice to do the following:

    find /ruta/directorio/ -iname "*.jpg" -type f -mtime -N -exec rm {} \;

    Just replace the N with the number of days.

    But if what you want is just to delete directories:

    find /ruta/directorio/ -iname "*.jpg" -type d -mtime -N -exec rm -r {} \;
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