quote:

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> I am going to store 3 files in a directory. Every day I want to delete
> the oldest one. How do I do that? The files will have part of their
> name exactly the same.

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> ls -lrt *filename* | cut -d" " -f2 | how do i know to delete?

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>
> 2003/11/20, 12:13(-08), Ryan Gaffuri:
> [...]
>
> With zsh:
>
> rm ./*filename*(Om[1])
>
> With any shell:
>
> rm "`ls -rt ./*filename* | head -1`"
>
> (provided the file names don't contain NL characters).

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[...][QUOTE][color=darkred]
> This doesn't meet the (snipped) requirement "also, if i
> have less than 3 files in the directory, I do not want to
> delete any."

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quote:

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> I am going to store 3 files in a directory. Every day I want to delete
> the oldest one. How do I do that? The files will have part of their
> name exactly the same.
>
> also, if i have less than 3 files in the directory, I do not want to
> delete any.
>
> how do i do this? my scripting skills are weak. I need to do something
> like this I think
>
> ls -lrt *filename* | cut -d" " -f2 | how do i know to delete?

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[...][QUOTE][color=darkred]
>
> ls -t *filename* | (
> read file1 && read file2 && read file3 && rm "$file3" )

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quote:

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> I am going to store 3 files in a directory. Every day I want to delete
> the oldest one. How do I do that? The files will have part of their
> name exactly the same.
>
> also, if i have less than 3 files in the directory, I do not want to
> delete any.
>
> how do i do this? my scripting skills are weak. I need to do something
> like this I think
>
> ls -lrt *filename* | cut -d" " -f2 | how do i know to delete?

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quote:

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> In article <bpmmtu025t8@enews4.newsguy.com>, phil-news-nospam@ipal.net wrote:
> : On 20 Nov 2003 12:13:36 -0800 Ryan Gaffuri <rgaffuri@cox.net> wrote:
> :
> :| I am going to store 3 files in a directory. Every day I want to delete
> :| the oldest one. How do I do that? The files will have part of their
> :| name exactly the same.
> :|
> :| also, if i have less than 3 files in the directory, I do not want to
> :| delete any.
> :
> : If you can generalize the definition this way: keep the 2 most recent files
> : the programming it involves sorting the file names by their time, removing
> : the 2 most recent from the list, and deleting all that remain in the list,
> : if any.
> :
> :| how do i do this? my scripting skills are weak. I need to do something
> :| like this I think
> :
> If you have C-Kermit, it's easy:
>
> http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ckermit.html
>
> Here's the script:
>
> define somedirectory /tmp ; or whatever
> cd \m(somedirectory)
> if fail stop 1 "CD \m(somedirectory) failed"
> directory /sort:date /array:&a *
> if fail stop 1 "DIRECTORY \m(somedirectory) failed"
> for \%i 3 \fdim(&a) 1 {
> delete /list /simulate \&a[\%i]
> if fail stop 1 "DELETE \&a[\%i] failed"
> }
>
> This deletes all but the two newest files. Brief explanation:
>
> . The directory name is defined symbolically so you only have to
> change it one place.
>
> . Each step is checked for success before proceeding to the next so,
> for example, we don't delete files from the wrong directory.
>
> . The DIRECTORY command puts the names of the selected file (* in this
> case) into the array \&a[] in the specified order (chronological by
> modtime in this case).
>
> . The FOR loop deletes all files after the first two (i.e. starting at
> file number 3). \fdim(&a) is the number of elements in the array.
> The /SIMULATE switch is for testing -- remove it after satisfying
> yourself that the script does what you want.
>
> Use Kermit's HELP command to find out more about the DIRECTORY, DELETE,
> and other commands. For example, you could use a single DELETE command
> to clean out all files that are more than a week old except those that
> have "keep" in their names:
>
> delete /before:-1week /except:*keep* *
>
> Add the /RECURSIVE switch if you want to do this in a whole directory
> tree.
>
> - Frank

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