PowerShell Script to Clean Up Old Files Based on Age

Posted on 20. January 2010 by admin

Here’s an extremely simple PowerShell script to remove old files based on age. You could use it to enforce a policy that keeps 90 days of ETL input files on a server. Files older than that would purged with this script. The script would be invoked by a SQLAgent CMDExec task or a Windows Task Scheduler job. Be sure to test with the -whatif switch before deploying.

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$intFileAge = 15  #age of files in days
$strCleanupPath = "filesystem::\\Server\Share..." #path to clean up - UNC paths permissible and probably preferred
 
#create filter to exclude files newer than specified age as well as all folder objects
Filter Select-FileAge 
      {
      param($days)
      If ($_.PSisContainer) {}
              # Exclude folders from result set
      ElseIf ($_.LastWriteTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays($days * -1))
            {$_}
      }
 
get-Childitem -recurse $strCleanupPath | Select-FileAge $intFileAge | remove-item
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3 Responses to PowerShell Script to Clean Up Old Files Based on Age

  1. JWest says:
    23. March 2010 at 18:36

    Nice and concise. Helped with a cleanup task I had.

  2. Joshua says:
    19. April 2010 at 18:38

    Great post… Could be used as a script using parameters real easy.

  3. Karen says:
    6. December 2010 at 12:09

    Thanks for the simple and helpful script.

Comments are closed.