I would like to delete only the files that were created more than 15 days ago in a particular folder. How could I do this using PowerShell?
10 Answers
The given answers will only delete files (which admittedly is what is in the title of this post), but here's some code that will first delete all of the files older than 15 days, and then recursively delete any empty directories that may have been left behind. My code also uses the -Force
option to delete hidden and read-only files as well. Also, I chose to not use aliases as the OP is new to PowerShell and may not understand what gci
, ?
, %
, etc. are.
$limit = (Get-Date).AddDays(-15)
$path = "C:\Some\Path"
# Delete files older than the $limit.
Get-ChildItem -Path $path -Recurse -Force | Where-Object { !$_.PSIsContainer -and $_.CreationTime -lt $limit } | Remove-Item -Force
# Delete any empty directories left behind after deleting the old files.
Get-ChildItem -Path $path -Recurse -Force | Where-Object { $_.PSIsContainer -and (Get-ChildItem -Path $_.FullName -Recurse -Force | Where-Object { !$_.PSIsContainer }) -eq $null } | Remove-Item -Force -Recurse
And of course if you want to see what files/folders will be deleted before actually deleting them, you can just add the -WhatIf
switch to the Remove-Item
cmdlet call at the end of both lines.
If you only want to delete files that haven't been updated in 15 days, vs. created 15 days ago, then you can use $_.LastWriteTime
instead of $_.CreationTime
.
The code shown here is PowerShell v2.0 compatible, but I also show this code and the faster PowerShell v3.0 code as handy reusable functions on my blog.
Basically, you iterate over files under the given path, subtract the CreationTime
of each file found from the current time, and compare against the Days
property of the result. The -WhatIf
switch will tell you what will happen without actually deleting the files (which files will be deleted), remove the switch to actually delete the files:
$old = 15
$now = Get-Date
Get-ChildItem $path -Recurse |
Where-Object {-not $_.PSIsContainer -and $now.Subtract($_.CreationTime).Days -gt $old } |
Remove-Item -WhatIf
Esperento57's script doesn't work in older PowerShell versions. This example does:
Get-ChildItem -Path "C:\temp" -Recurse -force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | where {($_.LastwriteTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-15) ) -and (! $_.PSIsContainer)} | select name| Remove-Item -Verbose -Force -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
#----- Define parameters -----#
#----- Get current date ----#
$Now = Get-Date
$Days = "15" #----- define amount of days ----#
$Targetfolder = "C:\Logs" #----- define folder where files are located ----#
$Extension = "*.log" #----- define extension ----#
$Lastwrite = $Now.AddDays(-$Days)
#----- Get files based on lastwrite filter and specified folder ---#
$Files = Get-Children $Targetfolder -include $Extension -Recurse | where {$_.LastwriteTime -le "$Lastwrite"}
foreach ($File in $Files)
{
if ($File -ne $Null)
{
write-host "Deleting File $File" backgroundcolor "DarkRed"
Remove-item $File.Fullname | out-null
}
else
write-host "No more files to delete" -forgroundcolor "Green"
}
}