How to Delete All Files Older Than 3 Days When "Argument List Too Long"

How to delete all files older than 3 days when Argument list too long ?

To delete all files and directories within the current directory:

find . -mtime +3 | xargs rm -Rf

Or alternatively, more in line with the OP's original command:

find . -mtime +3 -exec rm -Rf -- {} \;

Argument list too long error for rm, cp, mv commands

The reason this occurs is because bash actually expands the asterisk to every matching file, producing a very long command line.

Try this:

find . -name "*.pdf" -print0 | xargs -0 rm

Warning: this is a recursive search and will find (and delete) files in subdirectories as well. Tack on -f to the rm command only if you are sure you don't want confirmation.

You can do the following to make the command non-recursive:

find . -maxdepth 1 -name "*.pdf" -print0 | xargs -0 rm

Another option is to use find's -delete flag:

find . -name "*.pdf" -delete

CMD delete files older than X days in specific folders

Nobody answered me but I've found the solution at the problem..

I post the snippet, maybe it will be useful for somebody.

for /d %%a in (C:\AwesomeSoftware\*) do (
    for /d %%x in (%%a\Data\*) do (forfiles /p "%%x\Temp" /s /m *.* /D -7 /C "cmd /c del @path")
)

Deleting files after 7 days not working

From man find:

-atime n

  File  was  last  accessed  n*24  hours  ago.  When find figures out how many
  24-hour periods ago the file was  last  accessed,  any  fractional  part  is
  ignored,  so  to  match -atime +1, a file has to have been accessed at least
  two days ago.

This means that your command actually deletes files that were accessed 8 or more days ago.

Since the time now is

$ date
Tue Nov  7 10:29:29 PST 2017

find will require files need to be older than:

$ date -d 'now - 8 days'
Mon Oct 30 11:29:05 PDT 2017

In other words, leaving some files from Oct 30 is expected and documented behavior.

To account for find rounding down, simply use -mtime +6 instead.

How to use libiconv correctly in C so that it would not report Arg list too long ?

According to the man page, you get E2BIG when there's insufficient room at *outbuf.

I think the fifth argument should be a number of bytes.

wchar_t *utf8_to_wstr(const char *src) {
    iconv_t cd = iconv_open("wchar_t", "UTF-8");
    if (cd == (iconv_t)-1)
        goto Error1;

    size_t src_len = strlen(src);                 // In bytes, excludes NUL
    size_t dst_len = sizeof(wchar_t) * src_len;   // In bytes, excludes NUL
    size_t dst_size = dst_len + sizeof(wchar_t);  // In bytes, including NUL
    wchar_t *buf = malloc(dst_size);
    if (!buf)
        goto Error2;

    wchar_t *dst = buf;
    if (iconv(cd, &(char*)src, &src_len, &(char*)dst, &dst_len) == (size_t)-1)
        goto Error3;

    *dst = L'\0';
    iconv_close(cd);
    return buf;

Error3:
    free(buf);
Error2:
    iconv_close(cd);
Error1:
    return NULL;
}

Batch file to delete files older than N days

Enjoy:

forfiles -p "C:\what\ever" -s -m *.* -d <number of days> -c "cmd /c del @path"

See forfiles documentation for more details.

For more goodies, refer to An A-Z Index of the Windows XP command line.

If you don't have forfiles installed on your machine, copy it from any Windows Server 2003 to your Windows XP machine at %WinDir%\system32\. This is possible since the EXE is fully compatible between Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP.

Later versions of Windows and Windows Server have it installed by default.

For Windows 7 and newer (including Windows 10):

The syntax has changed a little. Therefore the updated command is:

forfiles /p "C:\what\ever" /s /m *.* /D -<number of days> /C "cmd /c del @path"

Remove files older than x days in a loop without using find unix

You can create a temporary file with a timestamp of X days ago and then inside your for loop compare each file's timestamp with that file to decide whether to delete it or not.

n=60 # number of days
ref="/tmp/$$.tmp" # temporary filename

touch -t $(date -d "-$n days" '+%Y%m%d%H%M.%S') "$ref"

for f in /path/tomy/directory/*.rpt; do
   [[ -f $f && $ref -nt $f ]] && echo rm "$f"
done

rm "$ref"

Once you're satisfied with the output, remove echo before rm.

Delete all directories and its files older than a 60 days regardless of whether the directory is empty or not

Your issue is because find is deleting its search base directories before it has finished iterating these, so calling your rm -rf on already deleted entries.

This is easily fixed by adding the -depth option.

Also, you should really end the rm options with a double dash --, to prevent having arguments provided by the find command, to be interpreted as options arguments by the rm command.

find /mnt/games/codes/ -depth -mtime '+60' -type d -exec rm -rf -- {} \;

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