I recently did something like a private file sharing, and to not control what users are uploading, added a script in cron that files that were deleted automatically for more than 3 days.
An example of a command to delete files with more than N days:
find /var/www/share/ -type f -mtime +N -delete
If you need to delete the directories and all that is in them, then this command:
find /var/www/share/ -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -mtime +N -exec rm -rfv -- {} +
You can also write logs (and do not forget to configure logrotate):
find /var/www/share/ -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -mtime +N -exec rm -rfv -- {} + >> /dir/log.txt
Instead of deleting, you can check what data is deleted by the command:
find /var/www/share/ -mindepth 1 -type d -mtime +N -print
Deleting files older than 1 year and deleting empty directories:
find /var/www/share/ -type f -mtime +365 -delete
find /var/www/share/ -type d -empty -delete
Write a command to a file and put it in the desired directory, for example /home/user/share.sh
We add a link to this file in /etc/crontab. The scheduler will execute it every day at 4 am on behalf of the user “www-data” and thus will delete files that are stored longer N days:
0 4 * * * www-data /home/ixnfo.com/share.sh > /dev/null 2>&1
See also my articles:
How to change file date in linux
Script to check the free space on the HDD