Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi All,

I have a difficult problem (at least for me) and need your help.
Situation is like this, there are a lot of files in a lot of folders and some of them files are just versions of the same file saved by careful users . Once every few months I have to clean up and keep the last version of each file.
Content of one folder could look like this:
filename01.ext
filename02.ext
filename03.ext
anotherfilename02.ext
anotherfilename03.ext
anotherfilename04.ext
justaname.exte
andyetanothername01.ex
andyetanothername02.ex
andyetanothername03.ex
andyetanothername04.ex
andyetanothername05.ex

After running a script remaining files in this folder should be:
filename03.ext
anotherfilename04.ext
justaname.exte
andyetanothername05.ex

File extension "ext" could be 2, 3 or 4 letters, the number which gives the version is < 100.
Now, a script that solves just the files in the current folder would suffice, I think I'll manage to run it recursive in all folders.
I've searched other similar posts, found that e.g. ls -lt | awk '{ print $9 }' | cut -d "." -f1 | sort | uniq will print all the filenames without extension, if I could remove the last two numeric characters I would have a list of names to search for versions for each name, then sort this versions list, remove the last one from the list (sort -r | tail -n +2) and remove the remaining ones.
Another approach would be to sort the list of versions and delete by inode all but the last index.


Any help would be appreciated.

is this command work?

Code:

ls -lt | awk '{ print $9 }' | cut -d "." -f1 | sed 's/[0-9]*$//g' | sort -u | while read line
do
  ls "${line}"* | sort -r | tail -n +2
  #~ ls "${line}"* | sort -r | tail -n +2 | xargs rm
done

if that command work, it will list name of files that will be deleted. and if you uncomment second line after do, it will remove the listed files.
I only know that way, maybe someone have more simple one that works.

Well... it almost works.
It deletes all the files in that folder....

Still, good approach, I will study it further.