Hi,

As a general approach, you could try something like this:

1. Identify the first part of each filename before the version number and architecture (e.g. for foo-1.3.2-1024.1.rhel6.x86_64.rpm, you'd want to just capture the foo- part).

2. For each base filename determined in Step 1, do an ls on all of them in chronological or alphabetical order (or whatever order you desire).

3. From the output of Step 2, keep the last X lines of the output.

4. Keep only those files you listed in Step 3, and remove/archive every other foo-*rpm file that was not on the list.

That's the first idea that springs to mind, anyway.

The second method I can think of (and the one I'd probably use myself in this type of situation) is to use find. If you could clearly identify a cut-off point in time beyond which you wanted to discard all RPMs, then something like this might work:

Code:

find /path/to/rpms -type f -name "*.rpm" -mtime +31 -exec rm -fv \{\} \;

This particular example would remove all files with names matching the pattern *.rpm older than 31 days. Note again that this will only be safe if you are sure that every part of this is safe to do: i.e. that there's nothing else you could accidentally match with *.rpm beneath /path/to/rpms/ other than the RPMs you want to remove; and that 31 days is an acceptable and safe cut-off point beyond which it is definitely safe to delete things.

Anyway, there's a couple of possibilities for you to consider.