delete oldest file

[sjaiswal]

Hi

I want to find the file with *.core extension in a directory.
If the Number of such files are > 50 then i want to delete all thos *.core files whose modification time is oldest.

I don't want to use ls -t command because if the number of file are large say 3000 the it possible that this command gets hang.

I prefably want to use find


Thanks

[matonb]

Not sure if you can use find to find the oldest file...

You could still use ls with using the '*' which will expand and may cause you problems as you've mentioned.

As a work around you could try something like

ls -t | grep "\.core$" | tail -n1

which would give you the file name of the oldest .core file.

[vsemaska]

I'm sure there's probably a more eloquent way of doing this but this works.

What it does is:

List the date of each file found in the format yyyymmddhhmmss
Sort date in decreasing order
Extract the filename starting with the 51st file
Pass it to xargs to execute the rm command

Use at your own risk.

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "*.core" -exec ls -l --time-style=+%Y%m%d%H%M%S {} \; | \
sort -k6,6nr | awk 'NR>50 {print $7}' | xargs rm -fv

Before using it with 'xargs rm -fv' use 'xargs ls -l' to make sure it's selecting the correct files to delete.

[sathiya]

find is the right way to do...

use "find" command..