How to delete files older than N days from a folder using PowerShell script? How to schedule this script with Windows scheduled task?

      For System admin, Server Disk/drive management is one of the tedious task when he manages hundreds of servers. System admin deletes temporary files, log files, backup files, and junk files etc. to free disk space when he face disk full issue.

     Windows PowerShell is powerful tool which can be used in combination with scripts. Suppose you want to delete 10 days older files from a folder (say C:\IISLogs) recursively (it goes subfolders recursively). Copy below script in notepad and save with “ps1” file extension (e.g. DelOlderFiles.ps1 saved in folder C:\script).

$a = Get-ChildItem "C:\IISLogs" -recurse foreach($x in $a)     {         $y = ((Get-Date) - $x.LastWriteTime).Days                 if ($y -gt 10  -and $x.PsISContainer -ne $True)                 {                       $x.Delete()                 }     }

Execute following command in PowerShell console to change Executions Policy as “RemoteSigned”.

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

To run script from PowerShell console, go to the folder (C:\script) and run the script as follow,

PS C:\script> .\ DelOlderFiles.ps1

How to schedule script with Windows Task scheduler?

Create task. Don’t forget to select “Run whether user is logged on or not” option.

Schedule task.

Define action as follows.

Save Task. You have done!