Find old Files and their size

The first part is clear, find the old files like that:

find . -type f -mtime +365 -print

This gets all Files (-type f, -type d for directories) in the current directory (.) older than a year (-mtime +365) and prints them on stdout (-print)

to delet them, just use:

find . -type f -mtime +365 -exec rm {} \;

But if you want to use them further, a pipe will help you. For any reasons (I don’t know) this is not possible with the -print command. My Solution was the following:

find . -type f -mtime +365 -exec echo {} \;

Now, because there are possibly many many many files, it’s best to use xargs for the argument handling. I use du -ch to determine the file-size and the total:

find . -type f -mtime +365 -exec echo {} \; | xargs du -ch

This should help, Google helped me half-way out, the rest is a little command line magic.

Note: In my case there where really too many files, so that the whole command ended with a broken pipe. I used -type d to reduce the amount of arguments, the disadvantage is that directories are not necessary the same age as the files within.