My one-liner 'delete old files' command finds the right files but will not delete them

Question

This command correctly finds all files in the directory that are older than 1 day:

$ find /Users/[me]/test -type f ! -newermt -1day | xargs -0 -n1
/Users/[me]/test/1.txt
/Users/[me]/test/2.txt

However, when I change the 'xargs' parameter to delete them it throws an error:

$ find /Users/[me]/test -type f ! -newermt -1day | xargs -0 rm
rm: /Users/[me]/test/2.txt
/Users/[me]/test/1.txt
: No such file or directory

Anyone know what the problem is and how to fix it?

Or maybe there's a better way of doing this? (I'm not very familiar with the macos command line, as you can probably tell!)

Answer 1

find can delete directly.

find /Users/[me]/test -type f ! -newermt -1day -delete

Answer 2

While there are alternative flags to find such as -delete and -print0, to answer the question of what the problem is with xargs and how to fix that problem…

xargs -0 expects the null character to separate arguments.
find outputs results separated by a new line.

Therefore xargs see the result of find as

/Users/[me]/test/2.txt\n/Users/[me]/test/1.txt
#                     ^^ new line

which is one argument.

rm tries to remove the one file with that name (containing a new line), which you can think of as executing

rm "/Users/[me]/test/2.txt\n/Users/[me]/test/1.txt"

(where \n would be a new line) which it cannot find.

Remove -0 from xargs to split on new line so it executes

rm "/Users/[me]/test/2.txt" "/Users/[me]/test/1.txt"

Or, to make this more robust and able to handle arbitrary file names, including those that might have a \n in the file name itself, use

find /Users/[me]/test -type f ! -newermt -1day -print0 | xargs -0 -rm

Answer 3

Source of the problem explained in @grg answer. Here is alternative solution:

You need to add -print0 to find arguments.

find /Users/[me]/test -type f ! -newermt -1day -print0 | xargs -0 rm