Here is my directory structure.
./TEST1/automation
./TEST2_1/automation
./TEST3.4/automation
./general/automation
I want to preserve only the latest 5 sub-folders under all directories that starts with TEST*/automation.
Currently, my script goes into each directory as below and executes the command:
./TEST1/automation
ls -dt */ | tail -n +5 | xargs rm -rf
./TEST2_1/automation
ls -dt */ | tail -n +5 | xargs rm -rf
./TEST3.4/automation
ls -dt */ | tail -n +5 | xargs rm -rf
Everytime we add a new folder that starts with TEST, I've to manually update the script.
Basically, go into all directories that starts with TEST*/automation and preseve only latest 5 folders.
Try this one:
find -regex '.*/TEST.*/automation' -print0 |xargs -0 -I {} -n1 bash -c 'cd "{}"; ls -rt | tail -n +4 | xargs -I {} echo rm -rf -- "{}"'
If the output looks alright (check that it does indeed show "rm ... " for all files/directories you want to get rid of) remove the echo.
Caveat: the second part of execution (the first xargs does not explicitly look for directories, it will also list files. From your description it's unclear whether your automation directories contain both files and directories or just directories.
Related
I would like to find files in my home directory that start with '~', sort them numerically, print the first five and delete them using find command and pipes in Linux. I have a bash script:
#!/bin/bash
find ~/ -name "~*" | sort -n | head -5 | tee | xargs rm
This works fine for deleting files, but I was expecting tee command to print deleted files to standard output. All this command does is delete files, but there in so output in terminal. What should I add/ change?
Thank you.
You could just use the verbose flag on rm and it will tell you what it's deleting
find ~/ -name "~*" | sort -n | head -5 | xargs rm -v
Use man rm to see the docs
-v, --verbose
explain what is being done
You can use rm -v to print each deleting filename:
find ~ -name '~*' -print0 | sort -zn | head -z -n 5 | xargs -0 rm -v
Also note use -print0 and all corresponding options in sort. head, xargs to address filenames with whitespace and glob characters.
I want to delete oldest files in a directory when the number of files is greater than 5. I'm using
(ls -1t | tail -n 3)
to get the oldest 3 files in the directory. This works exactly as I want. Now I want to delete them in a single command with rm. As I'm running these commands on a Linux server, cd into the directory and deleting is not working so I need to use either find or ls with rm and delete the oldest 3 files. Please help out.
Thanks :)
If you want to delete files from some arbitrary directory, then pass the directory name into the ls command. The default is to use the current directory.
Then use $() parameter expansion to transfer the result of tail into rm like this
rm $(ls -1t dirname| tail -n 3)
rm $(ls -1t | tail -n 3) 2> /dev/null
ls may return No such file or directory error message, which may cause rm to run unnessesary with that value.
With the help of following answer: find - suppress "No such file or directory" errors and https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/140647/198423
find $dirname -type d -exec ls -1t {} + | tail -n 3 | xargs rm -rf
This is a backup script that copies files from one directory to another. I use a for loop to check if there are more than five files. If there are, the loop should delete the oldest entries first.
I tried ls -tr | head -n -5 | xargs rm from the command line and it works successfully to delete older files if there are more than 5 in the directory.
However, when I put it into my for loop, I get an error rm: missing operand
Here is the full script. I don't think I am using the for loop correctly in the script, but I'm really not sure how to use the commands ls -tr | head -n -5 | xargs rm in a loop that iterates over the files in the directory.
timestamp=$(date +"%m-%d-%Y")
dest=${HOME}/mybackups
src=${HOME}/safe
fname='bu_'
ffname=${HOME}/mybackups/${fname}${timestamp}.tar.gz
# for loop for deletion of file
for f in ${HOME}/mybackups/*
do
ls -tr | head -n -5 | xargs rm
done
if [ -e $ffname ];
then
echo "The backup for ${timestamp} has failed." | tee ${HOME}/mybackups/Error_${timestamp}
else
tar -vczf ${dest}/${fname}${timestamp}.tar.gz ${src}
fi
Edit: I took out the for loop, so it's now just:
[...]
ffname=${HOME}/mybackups/${fname}${timestamp}.tar.gz
ls -tr | head -n -5 | xargs rm
if [ -e $ffname ];
[...]
The script WILL work if it is in the mybackups directory, however, I continue to get the same error if it is not in that directory. The script gets the file names but tries to remove them from the current directory, I think... I tried several modifications but nothing has worked so far.
I get an error rm: missing operand
The cause of that error is that there are no files left to be deleted. To avoid that error, use the --no-run-if-empty option:
ls -tr | head -n -5 | xargs --no-run-if-empty rm
In the comments, mklement0 notes that this issue is peculiar to GNU xargs. BSD xargs will not run with an empty argument. Consequently, it does not need and does not support the --no-run-if-empty option.
More
Quoting from a section of code in the question:
for f in ${HOME}/mybackups/*
do
ls -tr | head -n -5 | xargs rm
done
Note that (1) f is never used for anything and (2) this runs the ls -tr | head -n -5 | xargs rm several times in a row when it needs to be run only once.
Obligatory Warning
Your approach parses the output of ls. This makes for a simple and easily understood command. It can work if all your files are sensibly named. It will not work in general. For more on this, see: Why you shouldn't parse the output of ls(1).
Safer Alternative
The following will work with all manner of file names, whether they contains spaces, tabs, newlines, or whatever:
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf '%T# %i\n' | sort -n | head -n -5 | while read tstamp inode
do
find . -inum "$inode" -delete
done
SMH. I ended up coming up to the simplest solution in the world by just cd-ing into the directory before I ran ls -tr | head -n -5 | xargs rm . Thanks for everyone's help!
timestamp=$(date +"%m-%d-%Y")
dest=${HOME}/mybackups
src=${HOME}/safe
fname='bu_'
ffname=${HOME}/mybackups/${fname}${timestamp}.tar.gz
cd ${HOME}/mybackups
ls -tr | head -n -5 | xargs rm
if [ -e $ffname ];
then
echo "The backup for ${timestamp} has failed." | tee ${HOME}/mybackups/Error_${timestamp}
else
tar -vczf ${dest}/${fname}${timestamp}.tar.gz ${src}
fi
This line ls -tr | head -n -5 | xargs rm came from here
ls -tr displays all the files, oldest first (-t newest first, -r
reverse).
head -n -5 displays all but the 5 last lines (ie the 5 newest files).
xargs rm calls rm for each selected file
.
In my shell script, I am creating a backup of my folder. I am setting this activity by cronjob and the schedule keeps on changing.
It is keeping the backup with timestamp. Like for e.g :
cd /tmp/BACKUP_DIR
backup_06-05-2014.tar
backup_06-08-2014.tar
backup_06-10-2014.tar
What I want, whenever I run the script, it should keep the latest one and the previously taken backup only. And delete the remaining backups.
Like if I run the script now, it should keep
backup_06-10-2014.tar
backup_06-18-2014.tar
And delete all the other one. What rm command should I use ?
Try as follows:
rm $(ls -1t /tmp/BACKUP_DIR | tail -n +2)
Listing sorted by date names of files with remaining only two newest
You could try deleting files older that 7 days using a find command, for example :
find /tmp/BACKUP_DIR -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "backup_*.tar" -mtime +6 -exec rm -f {} \;
Use
rm -rf `ls -lth backup_*.tar | awk '{print $NF}' | tail -n +4`
ls -lth backup_*.tar will give the sorted list of backup files (newest being at top)
awk '{print $NF}' will print file names and pass it to tail
tail -n +4 , will print file from number 3
At last tail's result is fed to rm to act
Another simplified method
rm -rf `ls -1rt backup_*.tar | tail -n +3`
I untarred something into a directory that already contained a lot of things. I wanted to untar into a separate directory instead. Now there are too many files to distinguish between. However the files that I have untarred have been created just now (right ?) and the original files haven’t been modified for long (at least a day). Is there a way to delete just these untarred files based on their creation information ?
Tar usually restores file timestamps, so filtering by time is not likely to work.
If you still have the tar file, you can use it to delete what you unpacked with something like:
tar tf file.tar --quoting-style=shell-always |xargs rm -i
The above will work in most cases, but not all (filenames that have a carriage return in them will break it), so be careful.
You could remove the directories by adding -r to that, but it's probably safer to just remove the toplevel directories manually.
find . -mtime -1 -type f | xargs rm
but test first with
find . -mtime -1 -type f | xargs echo
There are several different answers to this question in order of increasing complexity.
First, if this is a one off, and in this particular instance you are absolutely sure that there are no weird characters in your filenames (spaces are OK, but not tabs, newlines or other control characters, nor unicode characters) this will work:
tar -tf file.tar | egrep '^(\./)?[^/]+(/)?$' | egrep -v '^\./$' | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 rm -r
All that egrepping is to skip out on all the subdirectories of the subdirectories.
Another way to do this that works with funky filenames is this:
mkdir foodir
cd foodir
tar -xf ../file.tar
for file in *; do rm -rf ../"$file"; done
That will create a directory in which your archive has been expanded, but it sounds like you wanted that already anyway. It also will not handle any files who's names start with ..
To make that method work with files that start with ., do this:
mkdir foodir
cd foodir
tar -xf ../file.tar
find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 sh -c 'for file in "$#"; do rm -rf ../"$file"; done' junk
Lastly, taking from Mat's answer, you can do this and it will work for any filename and not require you to untar the directory again:
tar -tf file.tar | egrep '^(\./)?[^/]+(/)?$' | grep -v '^\./$' | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 bash -c 'for fname in "$#"; do fname="$(echo -ne "$fname")"; echo -n "$fname"; echo -ne "\0"; done' junk | xargs -0 rm -r
You can handle files and directories in one pass with:
tar -tf ../test/bob.tar --quoting-style=shell-always | sed -e "s/^\(.*\/\)'$/rmdir \1'/; t; s/^\(.*\)$/rm \1/;" | sort | bash
You can see what is going to happen leave off the pipe to 'bash'
tar -tf ../test/bob.tar --quoting-style=shell-always | sed -e "s/^\(.*\/\)'$/rmdir \1'/; t; s/^\(.*\)$/rm \1/;" | sort
to handle filenames with linefeeds you need more processing.