Delete files older than n-days via T-SQL

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Delete files older than n-days via T-SQL

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Gordon-265412

Posted Friday, April 04, 2008 11:53 PM

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Comments posted to this topic are about the item Delete files older than n-days via T-SQL

Your friendly High-Tech Janitor... :)

Post #480366

joelau@toledoblade.com

Posted Thursday, June 05, 2008 11:08 AM

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The 'Forfiles' command can do this in one line of code. I don't know why we have to re-invent the wheel here.

Post #512324

Gordon-265412

Posted Thursday, June 05, 2008 11:18 AM

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Forfiles is not included in every os by default. I needed to make sure that the code was supportable with no additional external software requirements (resource kit executables and such).

The Forfiles command would make life quite a bit simpler and it could be easily added to it and the FOR command removed...

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Post #512338

Juan Carlos-264378

Posted Friday, June 06, 2008 12:48 AM

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Thanks for the script.
Months ago I was looking for a scritp like this one with an additional feature: recursively delete old files in the selected folder an sub-folders.
I suppose it is difficault to deal with sub-folders at any level using T-SQL and finally I use an external exe program written in C# (deleteold.exe from codeproject).
Anyway, I would prefere this functionality in T-SQL Wink

Regards

Post #512710

mattyk6

Posted Wednesday, June 11, 2008 9:09 AM

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Just curiuos if anyone is using this? I'm planning to implement this at a disaster recovery site. On our live SQL Server we back up the db and ftp it to another location. I figure that I can run this as a job at the DR site to delete the old backups.

Post #515272

Gordon-265412

Posted Wednesday, June 11, 2008 10:04 AM

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The code presented is actually about six months older than the date on it - I've been using this method on around 150 servers since it's inception with no issues.

Edit:

FWIW, you can add a PRINT @DynDelete and if you schedule the code through SQLAgent you'll have the delete command output so you can record what is being deleted by having the job step append its output to a file. [My production version of this logs the deletes to a table]

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Post #515327

mattyk6

Posted Wednesday, June 11, 2008 10:13 AM

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thanks

Post #515337

Josep

Posted Tuesday, July 29, 2008 3:56 AM

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If you want to use SQL instead of other applications and you're using SQL Server 2005, why you don't use the extended procedure xp_delete_file?

Personally I feel it quite restricted and I still use a delete command line that I create for myself when I was using SQL Server 2000.

Post #542464