Hello everyone,
I am quite a bit puzzled by the following scripting need:

I have a tree of subfolders, starting from a root named "logs". There can be any number of knots, I will call them a, b and c in this attempt to explain things. Each knot can have n leaves, let's name them a1, a2, a3 and b1, and b2.
Each leaf folder will store log files, whose names are like YYYY-MM-DD.HHMMSS.log
The script I need will have to return the last n log files for every leaf, where n is as script parameter passed at runtime.

So it would look like this:

jeepescu@gondolin:/$ . myScript.sh 2
/home/jeepescu/logs/a/a1 2007-11-01.103005.log
/home/jeepescu/logs/a/a1 2007-11-01.102900.log
/home/jeepescu/logs/a/a2 2007-10-15.102105.log
/home/jeepescu/logs/a/a2 2007-09-11.103005.log
/home/jeepescu/logs/a/b1 2007-09-05.234900.log
/home/jeepescu/logs/a/b1 2007-09-11.102900.log
/home/jeepescu/logs/a/b2 2007-10-21.102105.log
/home/jeepescu/logs/a/b2 2007-09-17.103005.log


Now, is bash scripting a good tool for writing such a thing, or should I start looking into perl, python or other creature ?


Thanks in advance.

something like:

for d in logs/*/*
do
ls -1 $d | tail -n $1
done

"ls -1tr" might be better as it will force the output to be list chronologically (most recent at the bottom). My high school computer teacher told us to never leave anything to chance. Tell the computer exactly how you want it. Granted, the file names naturally lend themselves to being chronoligical, but you never know when someone might change the output format, and it leaves it being a bit more open to other, future application only having to change the base directory of the search.

Just my 2 cents.

change
ls -1 $d | tail -n $1
to
ls -1t $d | head -n $1

sorts newest at top

Thanks to all who replied.
It works marvelously!!!