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Remove logs older than X days

July 12, 2011 by Igor Drobot Leave a Comment

The simplest way to remove files older than $NUMBER of days..

Dry run (files will be NOT deleted, you will see a list with files older than 100 days)

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find -mtime +100 | less

find -mtime +100 | less

Another dry run, see what would be delete:

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find -mtime +600 | xargs echo rm
rm /var/log/squid3/access.log.0
rm /var/log/squid3/access.log.2

find -mtime +600 | xargs echo rm rm /var/log/squid3/access.log.0 rm /var/log/squid3/access.log.2

Finally if you decided to remove the files – the final command to delete them:

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find -mtime +600 | xargs rm

find -mtime +600 | xargs rm

Filed Under: Bash, Linux Tagged With: bash, find, Logs, rm, xargs

‘Argument list too long’

October 18, 2010 by Igor Drobot Leave a Comment


root@web2:$ rm pe-warn-*.bz2
-bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long

This peoblem happens when you are trying to delete too many files in a directory at the same time – it seems rm has special limits …

To solve the problem:
Use:

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find . -name 'pe-warn-*.bz2' | xargs rm

find . -name 'pe-warn-*.bz2' | xargs rm

or

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find . -name "pe-warn-*.bz2" -delete

find . -name "pe-warn-*.bz2" -delete

Filed Under: Bash, Debian, Linux, Ubuntu Tagged With: bash, limit, rm

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