[H-GEN] chestnut

[Tony Nugent]

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On Thu Mar 27 2003 at 10:13, Greg Black wrote:

> Sarah Hollings wrote:
> 
> > Anyone know of a simple one-[or-two]-liner (in bash or perl -e) for
> > deleting the oldest file in a directory?
> 
> This one will work in /bin/sh or any Bourne-style shell:
> 
>     rm `ls -tr | tail -1`

Two observations here... 
 - "-tr" will list them in the wrong order (tail will find the
   youngest file not the oldest), so only "-t" is needed.  Doh! :)
 - what if the oldest listed item is not a file?  You would need to
   check for that, so it would need to be smarter, perhaps something
   like this?

	rm `/bin/ls -lt | grep ^- | tail -1 | cut -b57-`

   If you wanted to include links, then:

	rm `/bin/ls -lt | grep -E ^-\|^l | tail -1 | cut -b57-`

Warnings:
 - the cut will prune off the leading "ls -l" output to give you
   only the filename, but the "57" may need to be tuned to match the
   local output of /bin/ls.  There might be a better way to do this
   that works on any standard "ls -l" format.
 - if the filename contains spaces, then boom!  I like bash, you can
   glob spaces cleanly:

	rm "$(/bin/ls -lt | grep -E ^-\|^l | tail -1 | cut -b57-)"

One issue to consider: "oldest file" -- by creation time, last
modify time, or last access date?  Options to /bin/ls can be used to
fine-tune this.

> Greg

Cheers
Tony

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