As the title says, I just started with linux mint and am falling in love with bash scripts 😍 Actually I’m not sure if it’s considered a script, but I want to delete the last 2 files in all subfolders in a folder. So far I’ve (after great effort) got the terminal to list the files, but I want to delete them. Here is how I get them listed:
for f in *; do ls $f | tail -n 2; done
All their names come satisfyingly up in the terminal. Now what? I tried adding | xargs rm but that didn’t delete them. I also tried something with find command but that didn’t work either. Some folders have 3 items, so I want to delete #2 and 3. Some folders have 15 items so I want to delete #14 and 15. Folders are arranged by name, so it’s always the last 2 that I want to delete.
It’s frustrating to be sooooo clooooose, but also very fun. Any help is appreciated!
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xargs rm -rf?for f in *; do ls $f | tail -n 2 | xargs rm -rf; done
You mean like that? rm -rf followed by a question mark does not inspire confidence XD
this will break pretty badly if you have filenames with spaces or newlines in them. so to make this actually robust, you now get to learn about
find -print0,xargs -0, and why you always, always need to add""around variables in bash.yes. that’s what I suggested… the question mark was there to ask you if you tried that :-D I’m at work, pretty busy :-D I hope you read the
rmmanual.-rmeans recursive
-fmeans force, which will delete the files/directories without interaction