Batch file to delete files older than N days

Question

I am looking for a way to delete all files older than 7 days in a batch file. I\'ve searched around the web, and found some examples with hundreds of lines of code, and oth

Answer 1

Expanding on aku's answer, I see a lot of people asking about UNC paths. Simply mapping the unc path to a drive letter will make forfiles happy. Mapping and unmapping of drives can be done programmatically in a batch file, for example.

net use Z: /delete
net use Z: \\unc\path\to\my\folder
forfiles /p Z: /s /m *.gz /D -7 /C "cmd /c del @path"

This will delete all files with a .gz extension that are older than 7 days. If you want to make sure Z: isn't mapped to anything else before using it you could do something simple as

net use Z: \\unc\path\to\my\folder
if %errorlevel% equ 0 (
    forfiles /p Z: /s /m *.gz /D -7 /C "cmd /c del @path"
) else (
    echo "Z: is already in use, please use another drive letter!"
)