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Python 3 Script to Delete All Files Older than N Days in a Directory on Terminal
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Jun 1, 2025
Get the full source code of application here:
View Video Transcript
0:00
uh hello guys welcome to this video So
0:02
in this video I will show you a Python
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script which will delete all the files
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which are older than X number of days So
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it can be either older than two 2 days 3
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days 4 days or older than a week older
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than 10 days 10 days You can replace
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this value right here So in the n value
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so it can be any value Let's suppose 3
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days 4 days 5 days 6 days So it will
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only delete those files which are older
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than this X amount of days So it's a
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very important script It will save you a
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lot of time and it will run inside the
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background and it will just search for
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those files which are no longer needed
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by you and it's older than three or 1
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week older than a month Those files will
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automatically be deleted by this Python
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script So I've given this script in the
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description of the video Now let me show
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you how I built
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this For this you only need the built-in
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modules which are operating system and
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also the time module So just import both
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these
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packages Uh after that here you need to
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mention which folder you are working
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with You need to give the path of that
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folder So I'm just give the name of the
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folder or you can even paste the
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complete path as well After that you
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specify the value fn right here This is
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the number of
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days older than this amount of days The
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script will automatically delete only
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those files which are older than 3 days
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And then now we will simply go to this
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directory
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chdr and we will go to that particular
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folder First of all by this code here we
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say get current working
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directory and move to that particular
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folder After moving to that folder we
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simply get list of those files which we
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want to
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delete We get all the files here Now we
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will compare the time here that you
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mentioned And for this we'll use the
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time module time dot
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time we'll get the current time and then
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in each day as you all know it's 8 8 6 4
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0 seconds are
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there So here we will looping through
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all the files here in this for
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loop and then we'll be comparing the
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time here If the time comes out to be
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larger than 3 days then that file will
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automatically get deleted So here we are
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simply getting that get current working
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directory We getting access to that file
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and now we are simply comparing the time
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So for this we use the stat method and
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here we simply pass the
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location and then we calculate the time
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here using this function
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st m time That's all After that we
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simply now we got this time here of the
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file which when the file was created Now
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we can simply inside this if condition
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we can compare that if that
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time is uh smaller than the current time
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that we mentioned minus the day
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multiplied by n So this is simple logic
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mathematical logic comparing the time
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period when the time when the file was
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created If the value evaluates to true
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in that case the file will be deleted
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and then we will use this remove
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function to delete the
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file That's all So this is the complete
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script here
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Uh very simple We are using simple logic
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to do this And now if you want to
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customize the total number of days you
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just need to change at the sing single
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location So if you want to delete only
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files older than 7 days you will put
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seven here to 30 days 30 here So this
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script will save you a lot of time It
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will just run this in the background You
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you no longer manually need to delete
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the older files the script will
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automatically do for you So I've given
4:25
all the source code in the description
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of the video Uh and also check out my
4:31
website freemediattools.com
4:34
uh which contains thousands of tools