Shell Programming and Scripting

I am using this command to remove all files and folders older than 24 hours;

Code:

find /databackup/dbs/* -maxdepth 0 -type d -mtime +0 -exec rm -rf {} \;

However, if/when backups to this folder fail and are not updated, it will completely destroy any backups we have in that folder.

What can I add to that line so it leaves the latest two folders (for example)
that were created.
So if backups don't run for a week I'm not stuck with an empty backup folder.

can someone help?

TIA

Post withdrawn.

I'm not very good at bash but I've been searching google for this and so far nothing without adding 10 lines of code and I still couldn't make heads or tails out of it.
Can anyone help?

So how is the backup folder structure, can we have the folder named as:

Code:

backup_20110122
backup_20110123
backup_20110124
backup_20110125

With that, you can list the folder name without the first 3 folders by sed '4,p' or awk 'NR>3'

Thanks for the reply.
the folder structure is like this;

Code:

180111
190111
200111
210111
240111

only dates.

is this how I would wrap it?:

Code:

find /databackup/dbs/* -maxdepth 0 -type d -mtime +0 | awk 'NR>3'

?

when I do this I only get 210111 showing up from the above folder list. Which means it displayed the folder that is 24+ hours old and ignored the oldest 3 folders from the listing.

without the NR>3 i get:

Code:

180111
190111
200111
210111

So it seems to just ignore the 3 oldest with the awk and only shows the latest one. (ignoring the previous/oldest 3)

I would want the script to ignore the latest 1,2 or 3 folders no matter what the time stamp is so it doesn't accidently remove all folders if backups don't run in 2 days.

Am I doing something wrong?

Your current date format is hard to sort, think to update in your backup script/cronjob and export folder format as below.
(I know there are some ways to resolve it, but can we have date format as: 110118 ?)

Code:

110118
110119
110120
110123
110125

find /databackup/dbs/* -maxdepth 0 -type d |sort -rn |awk 'NR>3'

... adding to rdcwayx...

Code:

find /databackup/dbs -maxdepth 0 -type d |sort -rn |awk 'NR>3' |
xargs rm -rf 

I looked at your original post, and you said: In the case you want to do it by date/time modification of the directory, you use:

Code:

ls -1tcp | grep "/$" | tail +3 | xargs echo rm -rf

When you are sure it's what you want, remove the "echo" from the xargs command.