LarsBlog

I've often found that I want to be able to periodically delete files older than a certain age from a given directory, so that disks don't slowly fill up with logs or other temporary data.  The approach I've used to do this under Linux is a little shell scripting, something like the following:

find /path/to/logs -type f -mtime +28 | xargs --delimiter=\\n rm 

This will look for files (-type f) in the directory /path/to/logs that are older than 28 days (-mtime +28), and then execute the command 'rm' passing each file as an argument.

You can substitute any command for 'rm', for example another script/command that will gzip your logs and move them to an archive directory:

find /path/to/logs/ -type f -mtime +28 | xargs --delimiter=\\n /home/build/archive_log.sh 

Note that the above will call archive_log.sh once with an argument for each result of find (so archive_log.sh would need to iterate through these arguments).  If instead you want to call archive_log.sh once for each result of find, you can use find's -exec option:

find /path/to/logs/ -type f -mtime +28 --exec /home/build/archive_log.sh {} \;

Another variation is as follows:

find /path/to/logs -maxdepth 1 -type d -mtime +28 | xargs --delimiter=\\n rm

This searches for directories (-type d) 1 level under /path/to/logs instead of files.

Then it's just a matter of scheduling command as a cron job to run every day/week/month.  I'm not going to explain that here, you can read about it on wikipedia if you want.