Deleting folders by last date accessed

spiceuser-s6au3 · 2021-10-29T15:59:02.000Z

Hi everyone, this is my first post so let me know if anything needs to be changed.

I’m working on cleaning up a file system. I want to get rid of files that haven’t been accessed for a long time (get rid of anything last accessed before x date).

In my research, I found Powershell scripts that recursively look through folders and delete files that were created before a certain date, but I can’t find any that delete files that were last accessed before a certain date. Does anyone have some input on how I can go about this?

I would appreciate any tips. Thanks!

Neally · 2021-10-29T16:09:35.000Z

Welcome

What have you tried? Where are you stuck?

If you post code, please use the ‘Insert Code’ button. Please and thank you!

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in theory:

Get-Childitem $parentFolder -Recurse  |
where-object {$_.lastAccessTime -lt (get-date).adddays(-30)} |
foreach{remove-item $_.fullname -recurse -force -verbose -whatif}

the ‘-30’ would not access in more than 30 days
what ‘-whatif’ shows you what it would delete, remove the ‘-whatif’ to actually delete stuff.

Make sure you have good backups before removing stuff :¬)

DoctorDNS · 2021-10-29T16:24:51.000Z

HI and welcome to the forum! Thanks for your post.

In general, you achieve this via a simple pipeline:

<get the files> | <select the ones you want> | Remove-Item

So,

$LastOKTime = (Get-Date).AddMonths(-12)    # 12 months ago
Get-ChildItem -Path C:\Foo\*.ps1 |
  Where-Object LastAccessTime -lt $LastOKTime |
    Remove-Item