i have a directory "ABC" with lots of old files and sub directories in it. the issue now is i want to delete away files which are older than 15 days in "ABC" without deleting the files in the sub directories and without deleting the sub directory. i tried using find command but it will drill down to the sub directory and delete files. i have zero experience in scripting so lots of help will be appreciated :)

Unless you are using the GNU find which supports the maxdepth option, what you are asking for is not easy. Place this command in a script of it's own: find . \( -type d ! -name . -prune \) -o \( -type f -print \) | nawk ' gsub("^./","") ' Now, if you are in the current directory that you want to search, it will only find the files in that current directory. For more info, check this link: http://www.unixreview.com/documents/s=8925/ur0310e/