Question: On my website I use PHP sessions. Session information is stored in files in my ./session path. After a few months I discovered that these session files are never deleted, by now there are 145.000 of them in this directory. 

How should these be cleaned up? Do I have to do it programmatically, or is ther a setting I can use somewhere that would have this cleanup happen automatically?

**EDIT** forgot to mention: This site runs at a provider, so I don't have access to a command line. I do have ftp-access, but the session files belong to another user (the one the webserver proces runs I guess) From the first answers I got I think it's not just a setting on the server or PHP, so I guess I'll have to implement something for it in PHP, and call that periodically from a browser (maybe from a cron job running on my own machine at home)

Answer: 
In case someone want's to do this with a cronjob, please keep in mind that this:

```
find .session/ -atime +7  -exec rm {} \;

```

is really slow, when having a lot of files.

Consider using this instead:

```
find .session/ -atime +7 | xargs -r rm

```

In Case you have spaces in you file names use this:

```
find .session/ -atime +7 -print0 | xargs -0 -r rm

```

`xargs` will fill up the commandline with files to be deleted, then run the `rm` command a lot lesser than `-exec rm {} \;`, which will call the `rm` command for each file.

Just my two cents
Use cron with find to delete files older than given threshold. 
For example to delete files that haven't been accessed for at least a week.

```
find .session/ -atime +7  -exec rm {} \;

```