Shell Programming and Scripting

I have 4 files in a directory and want to delete only first 2 files only..

Code:

$ ls -ltr
total 640
-rw-r--r--   1 user   other     148779 Oct 12 10:50 file1.xls
-rw-r--r--   1 user   other     148779 Oct 12 10:50 file2.xls
-rw-r--r--   1 user   other     148779 Oct 12 10:50 file3.xls
-rw-r--r--   1 user   other     148779 Oct 12 10:50 file4.xls

I have used the below code but getting an error

Code:

$ ls -ltr file* | head -n 2 | rm
usage: rm [-fiRr] file ...

Could anyone please let me know how to delete only the first 2 files ?

Thanks in advance...

Regards,
Giridhar Sripathi

Please try:-

Code:

find . -type f -exec ls -1rt {} \; | head -2 | xargs rm;

That is not a dependable approach. It may work for some, but not for others. For those for which it does work today, it could fail tomorrow. It could also delete files in a subdirectory.

ls is called with a single file argument. Meaning there is nothing to sort. The files will be seen by the pipeline in the order in which find visits them and find makes no guarantees about that order.

If find visits a directory before two regular files in the top-level directory, it could descend into a subdirectory and print the path to one of its regular files.

Regards,
Alister

My bad, I totally agree!

Please post a solution.

Try:

Code:

rm file[12].xls