I like this one and other thing I like is that mostly all -exec rm -rf {} \; can be replaced with -delete

$ find /home -mtime +1

The commands provided only find files modified 24 hours ago; this example finds files modified 24 hours or more ago. Likewise,

$ find /home -mtime 1

finds files modified about 24 hours ago, while

$ find /home -mtime 0

and

$ find /home -mtime -1

both find files modified less than 24 hours ago, but don’t find quite the same files, due to slight rounding differences when find calculates the time period.

One of the first changes I used to make any Unix system I inherited was to replace the “rm -rf /tmp/*” command found in startup scripts with

find /tmp -mtime +7 -exec /bin/rm -rf {} \;

which deletes all files/directories unmmodified in more than 7 days. Why? Because sometimes /tmp contains core and log files useful to figuring out why your system crashed – and having “rm -rf /tmp/*” in startup scripts cleaned them out.


$ touch "a b"
$ find . -name a\*b
./a b
$ find . -name a\*b -exec ls {} \;
./a b
$ find . -name a\*b -exec rm {} \;
$ find . -name a\*b
$