Last week I was finally getting around to fixing my backup tooling and validating the recovery procedures. I thought it would be a good idea to have rolling nightly backups on a secondary ZFS pool with weekly syncs to an external disk. I ended up using this exact command to purge the rolling backups: $ find ${BACKUP_FOLDER}/* -mtime +${DAYS_TO_KEEP} -exec rm {} \; Before we go any further, I want to point out that I was using the variable ${BACKUP_DIR}, not ${BACKUP_FOLDER}.