Removing older version files Post: 302766767

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Removing older version files Post 302766767 by alister on Tuesday 5th of February 2013 10:57:32 AM

02-05-2013

Registered User

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

alister

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ipescript

IPESCRIPT(1)						      General Commands Manual						      IPESCRIPT(1)

NAME

       ipescript - Run an Ipe script (written in Lua)

SYNOPSIS

       ipescript script { arguments }

DESCRIPTION

       ipescript  runs	an Ipe script written in Lua.  The Ipe bindings are automatically available in the script.  Ipescript looks for the script
       in any of the script directories.

       The script argument should not contain the .lua extension.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

       ipescript respects the following environment variables:

       IPELATEXDIR
	      the directory where ipetoipe runs Pdflatex.

       IPESCRIPTS a list of directories where Ipescript will look for
	      scripts.	When this variable is not set, Ipe searches first the current directory, then ~/.ipe/scripts, and finally the  system-wide
	      Ipe script directory.  When this variable is set, it should contain a list of directories, separated by semicolons.  A single under-
	      score is replaced by the system-wide Ipe script directory.

       IPEDEBUG
	      set this to 1 for debugging output from ipescript.

AUTHOR

       Otfried Cheong

REPORTING BUGS

       Please report bugs using Ipe bugzilla at http://ipe7.sourceforge.net/bugzilla.html

SEE ALSO

       Ipe is documented fully in The Ipe Manual, which is available online at http://ipe7.sourceforge.net/manual/manual.html .

								  August 28, 2011						      IPESCRIPT(1)

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