LKBEN11467: Powershell script to delete files older than n days.
LKB | Created: 16-12-2020 | Version: 2 | Language: EN | Rating: 0 | Outdated: False | Marked for deletion: False
Author: Wim Peeters - Keskon GmbH & Co. KG
Latest update: 01-01-2021 | Comment:
Symptom
You need to delete files from a certain age.
Cause
An example is the daily export of databases which will fill up your hard disk.
Solution
The following script will delete files which are older than 5 days from the backup folder. Please note it writes a logfile on c:\temp. It does not create a temp folder!
Get-Date >> c:\temp\remove-old-files.log
Get-ChildItem -path "s:\backup" |Where-Object CreationTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-5)|Remove-Item -WhatIf >> c:\temp\remove-old-files.log
Get-ChildItem -path "s:\backup" |Where-Object CreationTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-5)|Remove-Item >> c:\temp\remove-old-files.log
If you need to delete files, you might have to enable the checkbox to run with elevated privileges!
About the Author
Wim Peeters is electronics engineer with an additional master in IT and over 30 years of experience including time spent in support, development, consulting, training and database administration. Wim has worked with SQL Server since version 6.5. He has developed in C/C++, Java and C# on Windows and Linux in different European countries and different European languages. He writes knowledge base articles to solve IT problems and publishes them on the Lubby Knowledge Platform where he is one of the most important contributors and the main developer.