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Shell input to remove every second file in a directory

 
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# 1  
Old 07-16-2012
Shell input to remove every second file in a directory
Hey guys,

I am looking for simple shell script, so i can remove every second file in a directory.

For example in any given directory there are 10.000 files:

0001.jpg
0002.jpg
0003.jpg
0004.jpg
0005.jpg
0006.jpg
0007.jpg
0008.jpg
....
1111.jpg
1112.jpg
etc.

After running the command, it will delete every second file in the directory. Instead of 10.000 files there are now 5000 and the dir will look like:

0001.jpg
0003.jpg
0005.jpg
0007.jpg
....
1111.jpg

Now in this example I am deleting the second line, which result in only the even numbers getting deleted. But I want to be able to shrink down the directory every time I run the command.

So after running it a second time it should half the size of the directory in number of file and look like this:

0001.jpg
0005.jpg
....
etc

I already renamed all the files so that they are sequential.

Thanks! Smilie
# 2  
Old 07-16-2012
So all you want to do is deleting. Why cant you do that in a single run?
# 3  
Old 07-16-2012
I want to delete every other / second file in a directory.

As there are 10.000+ file in this dir, I don't want to do this manually?
# 4  
Old 07-16-2012
What I meant was, if you keep running this script, eventually you will end up in a single file! right?

Rather, why don't you just delete all of 'em except 0001?? Smilie
# 5  
Old 07-16-2012
If I wanted to run the script so many times that I just would have ended up with 0001 yes I would have just RM * except the first one yes. But That is obvious not the reason why I am posting this. I need to scale down a batch of photos for a specific reason. Deleting every other file will help me with this process.

I am stuck on how to filter out every other file, to eventually delete it.

---------- Post updated at 02:36 AM ---------- Previous update was at 02:24 AM ----------

awk ‘NR%2 != 0′

should result in every second file right?

---------- Post updated at 03:11 AM ---------- Previous update was at 02:36 AM ----------

got it

ls | sed -n "p;N;" | xargs rm -r
# 6  
Old 07-16-2012
Its good that you found something Smilie

I hope you should be using NR%2==0, so that it result in the even line
 
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