A k-uniform linear cycle of length ℓ, denoted by C (k) ℓ , is a cyclic list of k-sets A 1 , . . . , A ℓ such that consecutive sets intersect in exactly one element and nonconsecutive sets are disjoint. For all k ≥ 5 and ℓ ≥ 3 and sufficiently large n we detemine the largest size of a k-uniform set family on [n] not containing a linear cycle of length ℓ. For odd ℓ = 2t + 1 the unique extremal family F S consists of all k-sets in [n] intersecting a fixed t-set S in [n]. For even ℓ = 2t + 2, the unique extremal family consists of F S plus all the k-sets outside S containing some fixed two elements. For k ≥ 4 and large n we also establish an exact result for so-called minimal cycles. For all k ≥ 4 our results substantially extend Erdős' result on largest k-uniform families without t + 1 pairwise disjoint members and confirm, in a stronger form, a conjecture of Mubayi and Verstraëte [23]. Our main method is the delta system method.