Delete files older than X days on remote server with SCP/SFTP

deletingfilesscpsftp

Do anyone know some good way to delete files on remote server that are older than X days using just SCP/SFTP?
Sure I can write some script on perl etc but I feel it's overkill.
Any UNIX way?
Oneliner?
Separate utility?

Thanks

P.S.
The task is to delete some outdated backup files.

Best Answer

This question is very old but I still wanted to add my bash only solution as I was just searching for one when I came here. The grep tar in the listing command is just for my own purpose to list only tar files, can be adapted of course.

RESULT=`echo "ls -t path/to/old_backups/" | sftp -i ~/.ssh/your_ssh_key user@server.de | grep tar`

i=0
max=7
while read -r line; do
    (( i++ ))
    if (( i > max )); then
        echo "DELETE $i...$line"
        echo "rm $line" | sftp -i ~/.ssh/your_ssh_key user@server.de
    fi
done <<< "$RESULT"

This deletes all tar files in the given directory except the last 7 ones. It is not considering the date though but if you only have one backup per day it is good enough.

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