How do I delete files based on their timestamp?

[Anonymous Monk]

How do I delete files based on their timestamp?

Originally posted as a Categorized Question.

[reptile]

Or use perlfunc:stat from within perl. It'll give you just about everything you wanted to know about a file and more. The times returned are in seconds-since-epoch format just like time() so a little arithmetic and a comparison is all you need.

# delete $file if it's not been modified for 3 hours
if ( (stat $file)[9] < time() - (3600 * 3) ) {
    unlink $file;
}

[btrott]

Are you on a *nix system? Using find is probably the easiest way:

    find /foo/bar -mtime +7 -exec rm -rf {} \;

This will find all files under /foo/bar that were modified more than 7 days ago and remove them.

If you're *nix-impaired :) (and considering that this is a Perl site), use File::Find:

use File::Find;
find(\&wanted, '/foo/bar');

sub wanted {
    unlink $_ if -M $_ > 7;
}