Delete files older than 500 days

Question

I have directory with files from 2010 year.. I want to delete all files older than 500 days and I tried this:

find /var/log/arc/* -type f -mtime +500 -delete {}\;      

But I get this:

-bash: /usr/bin/find: Argument list too long

As I know this means that there are too many files and find can't handle them. But even if I put +2000 which is 3+ years I still getting this.

What I'm missing here?

Solution

You're missing that find doesn't need a list of files as input. The problem is that the glob /var/log/arc/* expands to too many files. However, find will recurse into subdirectories by default, so there's no need to use the glob at all:

find /var/log/arc/ -type f -mtime +500 -delete

-delete is a non-standard predicate. If your find implementation doesn't support it, you can use:

find /var/log/arc/ -type f -mtime +500 -exec rm -f {} +

instead.

Comments

[Kusalananda]

unix.stackexchange.com/a/239268/116858 (see also comment)

[Garg]

Thank's but now got this: find: invalid predicate -delete'`

[Garg]

Thank you. -exec rm {} \; do the trick.

[terdon]

@hobbs I don't see why not, -exec is defined by POSIX.