Shell Programming and Scripting

With zsh:

Code:

print **/*(Om[1])

Regarding handling path/filenames with possible embedded spaces:

An awk idiom for removing just one or a few fields and printing "the rest of a line" (without an explicit for loop) is to simply set those fields to an empty string and print $0.

So you can do something like:

Code:

    awk '{$1=""; print $0}' ...

To effectively just remove the first "word" from each line. (BTW: this example would still reflect the space before $2 --- so you'd want to use BEGIN { OFS="" } if you wanted to avoid the problem.

JimD (former Linux Gazette AnswerGuy)

thanks tim this is a perfect one!!

just found out this bug and wanted to tell you... now i saw you corrected yourself

big thanks for this one!

Thanks to both of you, this was a huge help for me.

I wanted to add this:

Code:

find . -type f -maxdepth 1 -printf "%T@ %p \n" | sort -n -k 1,1 | sed 's/^[0-9]* //' | head -n -3 | xargs -r rm -v

By adding "-maxdepth 1" to the find command, it prevents going through subdirectories, which I didn't want.

Of more use to others though, by using "head -n -3", I can get a list of all but the three newest files, and the "-r" flag on xargs prevents it from running "rm -v" if there are three or fewer files.

However, right now, xargs won't accept files with spaces... There are a number of ways around that, you could use "sed s/ /\\ /g" to replace all spaces with "\ ", which would work... I didn't need it for my purposes, so I left it out.

Anyway, thanks a bunch, I've been on and off wondering how to do this for a while, and you put me on the right path.