Is there a better way to delete files that are a month old in python?

Question

I have built a script that generates files daily and names them by the date that they are generated. However, I then need to delete these files after 1 month, and have found it to be a bit confusing. I believe that the following will work, but I would like to know if Python has a built in feature that allows for this a bit more Pythonicly and elegently.

Note that this code handles files that are at the end of a month with more days than the following month by deleting all files from last month when it reaches the last day of this month.

if today.month != 1:
    if today.day == days_in_month[today.month] and days_in_month[today.month] < days_in_month[today.month - 1]:
        for x in range(days_in_month[today.month],days_in_month[today.month-1]+1):
            date = date(today.year,today.month-1,x)

            fname = str(date)+".stub"
            remove(fname)
else:
    date = date(today.year-1,12,x)

    fname = str(date)+".stub"
    remove(fname)

Answer 1

Take a look at Python's datetime module, it has some classes that should simplify this a lot. You should be able to create a datetime.datetime object from your file name using datetime.datetime.strptime() , and another for the current time using datetime.datetime.now() . You can then subtract one from the other to get a datetime.timedelta object that you can use to figure out the difference between the dates.

Answer 2

Rather than looking at the filenames to determine the age, you could use the creation time.

Something like:

import os
import datetime

path = "/path/to/files"    

for file in os.listdir(path):
    fullpath   = os.path.join(path,file)    # turns 'file1.txt' into '/path/to/file1.txt'
    timestamp  = os.stat(fullpath).st_ctime # get timestamp of file
    createtime = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(timestamp)
    now        = datetime.datetime.now()
    delta      = now - createtime
    if delta.days > 30:
        os.remove(fullpath)