Report on files older then 90 days

I've found this to be closest to what I need done in my research:

This is harder than it looks...

Using mtime is better while using ctime may not work. If a backup program has backed up the files, it will cause ctime to advance if it resets atime. If your backup program does reset atime in this manner, then recent atime values indicate that someone (other than the backup program) is reading the file and perhaps it should not be removed. So, assuming a reasonable backup policy, atime may be the best choice.

Now consider a directory structure like:
./a/b/c/datafile
If datafile is recently created while a/b/c was already existent, directories a and a/b are stable while a/b/c is being updated. Doing a "rm -rf ./a" just because ./a has not changed will forcibly remove ./a/b/c/datafile which, in this case, is a recent file. Using rmdir for directories solves that. But we must be prepared for the fact that ./a must be left alone even though if passes the -ctime test.

On the other hand, if ./a/b/c/datafile is all old stuff, removing datafile renders ./a/b/c recently changed. Building a complete list of removal candidates prior to removing anything solves that.

We need process ./a/b before we process ./a and this implies that we need -depth on the find statement.

We cannot divide the world into ordinary files and directories unless we really want the script to fail if we encounter a socket, fifo, special file, etc. Instead we need to think in terms of directories and non-directories.

So maybe something like this will get you closer, (but I have not tested it):

find /basedirectory -depth -atime +3 > /tmp/tempfile1
exec < /tmp/tempfile1
while read item ; do
        if [[ -d $item ]] ; then
                rmdir $item && echo $item >> /tmp/tempfile2
        else
                rm $item && echo $item >> /tmp/tempfile2
        fi
done

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Hello!
this will help you.
Enjoy,
t.

# to find files older then 90 days:
find /<yourpath> -mtime +90 
 
#to delete files older then 90 days but not dirs
find /<yourpath> -mtime +90 |while read line; do if [ -f "$line" ]; then rm "$line"; fi; done

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In working with these suggestions and trying to get this to work I found it difficult to use xargs.  Many times the file paths and directory names had unusual characters that required sed to work some magic.  Once that hurdle was overcome, I started running into problems with an error because of too many arguments on the command line and the script would fail.

I now use a single command that is resource intensive on the system with a large amount of files to purge but it does get the job done correctly.  I then call another command to purge the empty directories (via perl)

find /path/to/files --type f mtime +90 -exec rm {} \;
perl -MFile::Find -e"finddepth(sub{rmdir},'/path/to/files')"