I am trying to delete all files that are older than 7 days. The command is working but not correctly.
find '/files/tem_data/' -mtime +7 -exec rm -rf {} +
It does delete files but it’s not accurate.
ls -Artl | head -n 2
The find does delete files, but when I run the ls command does contain files that should be deleted. For example today is November 7th. The find should delete all files before November 1st. It does not. The command leaves files that are in October 30 and 31. How can I delete files that are older than 7 days.
If I run find command like 3 minutes later. It deletes files with the date of October 30 and a time of 3 minutes after it first ran.
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Answer
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.