You'll also need to review how boolean logic works and the order of precence for boolean operators. Remember that between each option in find there is an implied AND operator. So when mixing in some OR operators that needs to be taken into account, otherwise you will zap anything and everything in 2, 3, and 4 regardless of its age:

But that might not get you what you want, if folders are empty. You might find the -mindepth and -daystart options useful.

Thanks Turbo for the help.

Its ending up deleting all the folders , I just tested need to do a bit research on your ans and would update you about my progress.

find . -type d -mtime +30 \( -name "1" -o -name "2" -o -name "3" -o -name "4" \) -delete

Now my main problem here is it will go ahead and delete all the folders (1,2,3,4) now if it is showing that 4 and 3 are the oldest it should only delete 4 and 3 here I think would need to add some sort or heads here then check among 1234 which one is oldest and delete.


[root@localhost backup]# find . -type d -mtime -1 \( -name "1" -o -name "2" -o -name "3" -o -name "4" \) -print
./4
./3
./1
./2
[root@localhost backup]# find . -type d -mtime -1 \( -name "1" -o -name "2" -o -name "3" -o -name "4" \) -delete
[root@localhost backup]# ll
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 4 18:08 setup
[root@localhost backup]#

did you try to combine it with post #12?

This is my conditions , I have to combine both of this and reach to the final solution


[root@localhost backup]# find . -type d -exec stat --format '%Y :%y %n' "{}" \; | sort -n | awk '{print $5}' | head -2
./1
./2

[root@localhost backup]# find . -type d -mtime -1 \( -name "1" -o -name "2" -o -name "3" -o -name "4" \)
./4
./3
./1
./2