How to Find and Remove Old or Inactive Files

1. Become superuser.

2. Find files that have not been accessed for a specified number of days and list them in a file.

   # find directory -type f [-atime +nnn] [-mtime +nnn] -print > filename

   directory	Directory you want to check. Directories below this also will be checked.
   -atime +nnn	Finds files that have not been accessed within the number of days you specify.
   -mtime +nnn	Finds files that have not been modified within the number of days you specify.
   filename	File containing the list of inactive files.

3. Remove the inactive files that you listed in the previous step.

   # rm `cat filename`

   filename

   File created by this command which contains the list of inactive files.

Example--Finding and Removing Old or Inactive Files

The following example locates regular files in /var/adm and its directories that have not been accessed in the last 60 days and saves the list of inactive files in /var/tmp/deadfiles. These files are then removed with the rm command.

# find /var/adm -type f -atime +60 -print > /var/tmp/deadfiles &
# more /var/tmp/deadfiles
/var/adm/log/asppp.log
/var/adm/aculog
/var/adm/spellhist
/var/adm/wtmp
/var/adm/wtmpx
/var/adm/sa/sa13
/var/adm/sa/sa27
/var/adm/sa/sa11
/var/adm/sa/sa23
/var/adm/sulog
/var/adm/vold.log
/var/adm/messages.1
/var/adm/messages.2
/var/adm/messages.3
# rm `cat /var/tmp/deadfiles`