4. Delete Old Log Files Automatically
1. Hello, World!
2. Rename Photos by Capture Date
3. Organize Downloads Folder by File Type
4. Delete Old Log Files Automatically
5. Find Duplicate Files Using MD5 Hashing
6. Generate Comprehensive File Inventory
7. Parse Web Server Logs for Performance Metrics
8. Extract Emails, URLs, and Phone Numbers from Text
9. Track Daily and Monthly Active Users from Apache Logs
10. Generate Formatted Text Reports with Column Alignment
11. Analyze Sales Transactions and Generate Revenue Reports
12. Clean and Validate CSV Data
13. Convert JSON API Responses to CSV
14. Parse and Validate Configuration Files
15. Build a CLI Calculator with Argument Parsing
16. Parse and Display Weather Data from JSON
17. Build a Simple Inventory System with Classes
18. Generate Markdown Table from CSV Data
19. Aggregate Sales Data by Time Period
20. Recursive Directory Size Calculator with Filtering
21. Parse and Transform Server Configuration
22. Find and Replace Across Multiple Files
23. Build a Simple Template Engine
24. CSV Data Validator with Business Rules
25. Build a Multi-Format Log Analyzer

Challenge

Problem

Application logs accumulate relentlessly, consuming disk space and eventually crashing servers. This drill teaches you to build a maintenance script that identifies and deletes files older than a specified number of days. You'll learn time arithmetic, file metadata handling, and summary reporting—essential skills for system administration tasks.

Difficulty: Beginner

Instructions

  1. Read the metadata.json file which contains log filenames, their ages in days, and sizes in bytes
  2. Find all files older than the specified days threshold
  3. Delete files that exceed the age threshold
  4. Output format: 'Deleted: filename.log (X days old)' for each deleted file
  5. Output summary: 'Total: X files deleted, Y.YY MB freed'
  6. Sort deleted files by name alphabetically

Files

Editable
Read-only

Hints

Hint 1

Read the metadata.json file using File.read and parse with JSON.parse

Hint 2

Iterate through the 'files' array in the metadata

Hint 3

Compare each file's age_days against the threshold

Hint 4

Use File.delete(path) to remove files

Hint 5

Track total bytes freed and convert to MB by dividing by 1048576.0

Hint 6

Use sprintf('%.2f', number) to format MB to 2 decimal places

Ruby 3.4

Provided Files (Read-only)

1. Deletes files older than threshold

Input: 
delete_old_files('logs', 30)
Expected Output: 
Deleted: app_old.log (45 days old)
Deleted: error_old.log (60 days old)
Total: 2 files deleted, 0.00 MB freed

2. Keeps recent files

Input: 
delete_old_files('logs', 30)
puts '---'
puts File.exist?('logs/access_recent.log')
puts File.exist?('logs/debug_recent.log')
Expected Output: 
Deleted: app_old.log (45 days old)
Deleted: error_old.log (60 days old)
Total: 2 files deleted, 0.00 MB freed
---
true
true
+ 2 hidden test cases