find is a very useful utility, but has so many capabilities that you end up hitting the man page every time you come back to it.
I occasionally need to remove old/cached files based on age, which is perfect for find. It’s able to search based on file access times, file status change times and file modification times. Not all systems even track access times (look at your mount options and/or /etc/fstab) so I try to search by modification time when possible. The *time options specify days (24 hours). The *min options specify minutes.
For example, I don’t usually need a copy of any temp files from more than a week ago:
find /tmp -mtime +7 -exec rm -f {} \;
In some cases, you’ll want to search for recent files rather than older files. In this case, you simply switch the sign in front of the number of days. To see a list of this last week’s temp files:
find /tmp -mtime -7
In one case, I needed to restrict to the last day’s FTP uploads, excluding any files that were currently being written (to inspect and remove unauthorized uploads). Here, I assumed that anything which hadn’t been touched for 30 minutes was no longer being uploaded:
find /var/ftp/pub -mmin +30 -mtime -1 -exec parse_script.sh {} \;