hey guys, im trying to delete old junk and i have 1000's of .wav files.

I want to do a search all files on a directory that are older than 1 month old, how can i do so?

thank you!!

Read though the "info find" manual.
Something like: "find <path-to-directory> -maxdepth 1 -mtime +30 -iname "*.wav" -exec rm '{}' \;" should do the trick.

First test it without the "-exec ls -l '{}' \;" instead of "-exec rm '{}' \;" which will print out the files it has found.

You could instead use "-printf '%f %p'" instead to print the filename and modification time.

This LinuxJournal article has quite a few examples of using the find command: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/1180

You can ask find to list files whose last modification date is more than some number of days, if that's close enough for you. Do this from the folder. Be aware that it will operate in all sub-directories as well!

You can get rid of the "-iname \*.wav" to list all files - not just those called something.wav...

This will list the files. Good to do that first and check the results are OK. Then you can do the actual delete, by appending xargs, like this:

Enjoy, but be careful!

find is quite confusing to start with, but it's an amazingly powerful program. While I was typing, jschiwal wrote more or less the same command as me, but using the -exec option in find rather than passing the list to xargs.

The xargs way is better if you have a very large number of files because it spawns one rm process for a large number of files, whereas using -exec will spawn one rm process per file to be deleted. Spawn processes takes time, so for large numbers of files you may notice xargs is significantly quicker.

However, there is a price to pay - files with spaces and other weird characters in the filename (OK, spaces aren't so weird) may cause the xargs method to not function properly. You can fix this using -print0 with find, and -0 with xargs:

hey guys,

thank you all for helping me with this. I ended up doing this
find /var/spool/asterisk/voicemail/default/ -type f -mtime +200 -iname \*.wav |xargs

and it worked great, if take out the |xargs it looks more uniformed however im totally feeling the |xargs and im deffinitely going to be using this from now on so thank you very much!!

now, basically if i want to only locate a file that starts with msg how do i put that i tried doing
find /var/spool/asterisk/voicemail/default/ -type f -mtime +200 -iname \msg*.wav |xargs but it did't work,
Incase you're wondering yes im deleting old voicemails from the system .

Again thank you very much for the help!!

You're not supposed to escape the "m" which is a normal character. The "*" will get expanded by the shell on invocation of the find command, though, so it should be escaped.

In short, you should thus use:
-iname msg\*.wav
or
-iname 'msg*.wav'

For next time, I suggest you read up on quoting and escaping in "man bash".

Worked like a charm..

Thank you so much!!

I thought I would add a little bit of info. The -ctime argument (create time) uses the date of the inode for the file, so if you change the attributes of the file, such as changing the ownership or permissions, then the -ctime will be effected. That's why -mtime may be better to use.

Awesome inside on the ctime.

thank you!!