Shell Command to remove older files

Hello Guys,

I am making backups of a client's website on a remote FTP location. I have a script (usable without root access on cPanel) which is making backups on given cron and transfer it to remote ftp location. Now the real problem is starting; as we can't have unlimited gigabytes of disk space on any server so we have to limit the backups. I was finding shell command (which can be added to cronjob directly or by creating a bash script and call that script from cron. I want to keep 1 week's daily backups. I want to delete any backup from that directory which is older than 1 week. I found following command which looks promising

find /path/to/files -mtime +30 -exec rm  {}\;

Code (markup):

But when I ran this command (for testing I replaced 'rm' with 'ls -l') I got following error

find: missing argument to `-exec'

Code (markup):

can anybody help to resolve this little issue?

I am running CentOS + cPanel



Thank You

 

try using:

find /path/to/files -mtime +30 -exec ls -l '{}' \;

 

Make sure that there is space between curly brackets "{}" and "\;"

 

You can use -delete option for 'find' instead of -exec. Just make sure everything is working like it should with use of -print at first.