Please chech my statement - delete all except file with largest number extension
 

Hello!

I need to remove all files except one with the greatest number suffix.
I.E. I have:

...
tmp.123
tmp.124
tmp.125
...
tmp.226

Now, I wrote the statement to delete all but tmp.226 ->

ls -1 tmp.* |sort -t'.' -rn -k2 |sed -n '2,$p' |xargs rm -f

I've tried this and it works but I need some experienced opinion... Is there any simpler solution?

Many thanks!!!

Well for a start you could squeeze a few chars out of that by using tail instead of sed (and taking ticks off around the dot in the delimiter option of sort; [EDIT] probably that "-1" for ls is not needed either):

That saves you a total of 6 chars (plus 3 more, if you remove the spaces to the left of each pipe sign) of typing, if I got it right. Not much, but you asked for a simpler solution, and that's such: less typing and no dollar sign :)

Hopefully something better follows; I'm too tired to think of anything wise now. [EDIT] Except that you could use a time-based sorting rather than suffix-based, if you knew which file to preserve; you could touch it (thus making it the "newest" file in terms of ctime) and then remove all the "older" files:

That should remove all but the newest (as in ctime, time of last modification of file status information) file, the one you just touched -- tmp.226. The downside of this is obviously that you need to know the filename of the "last" file which you want to preserve; though if you're fine with checking it out with ls, for example, go ahead. A suffix-based method is better if you don't want to fiddle with timestamps or if you want it "fully automated", though, and in any case you should first check (run without "rm") what gets removed and what not before taking real action.

Sorry, I forgot to tell that is not necceserily that i.e. file tmp.223 is older ther tmp.122. So, just say that I can't rely on time of modification...

Thank you for your answer, it's really simple solution (and I like them most :))!

All the examples you have given have three digits after the dot; will this always be true of every file that you compare?

(And note that, under Unixxy type systems that dot doesn't have a particular significance to the OS (it may have some significance to some particular app or your bash script) and temp.1234567890 is a valid filename, as is temp.123.456.789.0, temp.123.456.789.0.bak and temp.12 and so the, eg, .12 isn't an extension...the filename is the whole string of characters.)