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Full Discussion: Removing older version files
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Removing older version files Post 302766767 by alister on Tuesday 5th of February 2013 10:57:32 AM
Old 02-05-2013
Quote:
Originally Posted by balajesuri
Code:
#! /bin/bash

n=$1
x=`ls -l | wc -l`
for y in $(ls -1t | tail -$(( $x - $n ))); do rm -rf $y; done

Since ls is run twice, there's a race condition. If a directory is deleted in the meantime, a directory that should have been kept will be nuked. Similarly, if a directory is added in the meantime, a directory that should have been removed will persist.

There is no need to run ls twice. You can just use tail's ability to index releative to the beginning of the data, tail -n +10 versus tail -n 10. However, this approach still requires some arithmetic, since skipping the first x lines requires an option argument of x+1.

I wouldn't bother with tail. In my opinion, the simplest solution is to use sed:
Code:
ls -t | sed 1,10d | xargs rm -rf

Note that xargs does not play well with filenames containing whitespace or quotes. If such filenames occur, instead of xargs, a less efficient while-read loop would be necessary.
Code:
ls -t | sed 1,10d | while IFS= read -r dirname; do rm -fr "$dirname"; done

Regards,
Alister

Or, eve
 

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dh_installdeb

DH_INSTALLDEB(1)						     Debhelper							  DH_INSTALLDEB(1)

NAME

       dh_installdeb - install files into the DEBIAN directory

SYNOPSIS

       dh_installdeb [debhelperoptions]

DESCRIPTION

       dh_installdeb is a debhelper program that is responsible for installing files into the DEBIAN directories in package build directories with
       the correct permissions.

FILES

       package.postinst
       package.preinst
       package.postrm
       package.prerm
	   These maintainer scripts are installed into the DEBIAN directory.

	   Inside the scripts, the token #DEBHELPER# is replaced with shell script snippets generated by other debhelper commands.

       package.triggers
       package.shlibs
	   These control files are installed into the DEBIAN directory.

       package.conffiles
	   This control file will be installed into the DEBIAN directory.

	   In v3 compatibility mode and higher, all files in the etc/ directory in a package will automatically be flagged as conffiles by this
	   program, so there is no need to list them manually here.

       package.maintscript
	   Lines in this file correspond to dpkg-maintscript-helper(1) commands and parameters.  Any shell metacharacters will be escaped, so
	   arbitrary shell code cannot be inserted here.  For example, a line such as "mv_conffile /etc/oldconffile /etc/newconffile" will insert
	   maintainer script snippets into all maintainer scripts sufficient to move that conffile.

	   A versioned Pre-Dependency on dpkg is needed to use dpkg-maintscript-helper(1). An appropriate Pre-Dependency is set in
	   ${misc:Pre-Depends} ; you should make sure to put that token into an appropriate place in your debian/control file.

SEE ALSO

       debhelper(7)

       This program is a part of debhelper.

AUTHOR

       Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>

8.9.0ubuntu2.1							    2012-06-12							  DH_INSTALLDEB(1)
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