On one of our Raspbian(similar to Debian) boxes we have a directory containing a number of folders(this is not constant, we are adding and removing folders all the time). The folders will be named something like this:

- Live
- Live 1
- Live 2
- Live 3
- etc

What we need to do, is to automatically rename folder "Live" to the first open number(in example above 4), then reduce every folders number by 1(so that Live1 becomes Live, Live2 becomes Live1, and so on). This will be repeated a number of times every day.

Do you know how to do this?

Regards

Something like this

Put /path/to/Live* in a bash array
Then 'extract' the digit from the last member of array
Move Live to 'Last'.tmp
Then for each element of array, move to digit-1 (if 1, no digit)
Finally moving the Live(x).tmp to Live(x)

you may notice that bash arrays start at 0, (Live) , element 22 (Live22)

${#array[@]} will give you total number of elements 23 means last number is 22

Links

http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/arrays.html
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide/Arrays

'Hunt around' on both those sites for general bash stuff

Edit;
Example bash string substitution, , for the mv stuff

This sounds rather much like what the Linux/Unix logrotate utility does already!

1 members found this post helpful.

I didn't even think of that

Logrotate probably easier

Still wouldn't hurt to learn a bit'o'bash