If you have ever had any type of program or application that keeps logs or fouls up the temp directory in your system you know the frustration that comes from wasted disk space with old, unused files. Luckily, you can create a very basic PowerShell script to check a given folder and delete files that are older than a set number of days.

Let’s start with a basic script for this. We will have two variables: FilePath and FileDays. The file path is used for specifying what folder we want PowerShell to search against. If a file’s last write timestamp is less than the file days variable the script will delete said file from the directory. For the sake of simplicity, this script does not check dates on subdirectories nor does it attempt to delete subdirectories. The PowerShell script is just interested in files directly in the FilePath.

So enough talk, here is the script:

# Path to purge old files from
$FilePath = "C:\temp\"

# Define the minimum number of days since last write time
# for a file to be purged. Set this to a negative number, since
# it is in the past.
$FileDays = "-30"

foreach($File in Get-ChildItem $FilePath | Where {!($_.PsIsContainer)})
{
    if($File.LastWriteTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays($FileDays))
    {
        del $File.FullName
    }
}

Like I said, really simple. You could schedule this to run as a task, or you could even re-write this script to act as a function within another PowerShell script. This script is well suited for purging files from a log folder, say C:\dev\logs if the log files are created containing the current date in the file name (something-Year-Month-Day.log). This way, you will only have a month of log files at any given time. Once this script is set up, it is pretty much a “set it and forget it”.