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?
Answer
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.