Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi Friends,

Newbie to shell scripting. Currently i have used the below to sort data based on filenames and datestamp

Code:

$ printf '%s\n' *.dat* | sort -t. -k3,4
filename_1.dat.20120430.Z
filename_2.dat.20120430.Z
filename_3.dat.20120430.Z
filename_1.dat.20120501.Z
filename_2.dat.20120501.Z
filename_3.dat.20120501.Z
filename_1.dat.20120502.Z
filename_2.dat.20120502.Z
filename_3.dat.20120502.Z
filename_1.dat.20120627.Z
filename_2.dat.20120627.Z
filename_3.dat.20120627.Z
filename_1.dat.20120730.Z
filename_2.dat.20120730.Z
filename_3.dat.20120730.Z

Now i want to delete files with older date and keep 4 latest files available in the filename(no system timestamp here) So my result should be like

Code:

filename_1.dat.20120501.Z
filename_2.dat.20120501.Z
filename_3.dat.20120501.Z
filename_1.dat.20120502.Z
filename_2.dat.20120502.Z
filename_3.dat.20120502.Z
filename_1.dat.20120627.Z
filename_2.dat.20120627.Z
filename_3.dat.20120627.Z
filename_1.dat.20120730.Z
filename_2.dat.20120730.Z
filename_3.dat.20120730.Z

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