Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello there,

can anyone please help to write a bash script that can achieve the following:

1) list files that contain a certain string in order of their creation date. Ideally the script should ask me to type in the string by hand.
2) use that list and remove all except the last one created

Thank you.
Kjartan

Look at the -t and -r options of GNU ls. -t sorts by timestamp, and -r in reverse.
So to get the newest file with "_pat_" in the filename, you'd do:

Code:

ls -tr *_pat_* | tail -1

To get all but the newest one, sort them by creation date, and get rid of the first line:

Code:

 ls -t *_pat_* | sed 1d

If you are happy to get rid of what you see and you are ready to delete them, then do

Code:

 ls -t *_pat_* | sed 1d | xargs rm

or

Code:

 ls -t *_pat_* | sed 1d | while read i ; do echo "deleting $i" ; rm "$i" ; done

Thank you so much. That works fantastic.

Kjartan