how to delete a specific range of files

[goude]

Hi everyone

I have 50 files in the following format.

fileone.0001.txt
filetwo.0002.txt
filethree.0003.txt
filefour.0004.txt
filefive.0005.txt
filesix.0006.txt
fileseven.0007.txt up to filefifty.0050.txt

Can someone please show me how to delete only the first 20 files.

I can do

find . -type f -name '*txt' -exec rm -rf {} \;

but this will delete everything.

Can somebody please tell me how can I define the range of files I want to delete within this syntax?


Many many thanks

[Irithori]

try this

for a in {1..20}; do b=`printf '%02d.txt' $a`; ls -1 *$b; done | xargs ls -la

I am a bit uneasy with the *.
It would be better to guard it more, perhaps if the files all start with the same name?
Anyhow, if you feel comfortable, replace the ls with rm

[goude]

Thanks a lot for your reply Irithori

Yes the files all start with the same name, I shouldn't have rename them.

They are all in the format
file.0001.txt
file.0002.txt and so on.

When I run your script I got the errors below.

for: Command not found.
a: Undefined variable.
do: Command not found.
b: Undefined variable.

[Irithori]

Which shell are you using?
try

bash
for a in {1..20}; do b=`printf 'file.00%02d.txt' $a`; ls -la $b; done

And replace ls -la with rm if you are ok with the result

[goude]

Excellent!

Thank you very much IRITHON

See you in Octoberfest.