Shell Programming and Scripting

HI all ,

i want to make an automatic script using if / while to search for files in folder
and get the least by date and gzip them ( last 70 file )

/file/home/logs

30 files in 11/2012
45 files in 10/2012
30 files in 9/2012
10 files in 8/2012

so it get 10 + 30 + 30 ( from 10 ) and gzip them

what about my script

Code:

  for sourcefile in `ls -rt *.txt`
        do
        
       gzip $sourcefile 
if [ ` echo $sourcefile | wc -l ` -eq 1 ]
        then
      
        fi
exit

this wont finish i want it for 70 files only help me plz

Try:-

Code:

for sourcefile in `ls -lrt *.txt | awk 'NR>1 { print $NF } ' | head -70`
do
   echo "Gzipping file: $sourcefile"; gzip $sourcefile
done

This is an example of zipping the last 70 files modified:

Code:

ls -1t --file-type | sed '/.*\//d' | head -70 | zip test.zip -@

I'll put these codes in exc. file
Launcher.sh path/file ( I want the file path we work on to be variable and I can recall it inside the script so I can go to it from any place to work this script )

Thanks a lot

when you do ls -lrt *.txt you will not get the total word. So you dont need to use the awk

And consider the case where filenames contain spaces/new-lines.
Also, you don't need a long listing there. A plain ls -rt *.txt is sufficient to get the filenames in the required order.