Bash scripting question

nitroid · 04-13-2006, 06:35 AM

I'm making a bash script that has to (amongst other things I figured out myself) delete the oldest file in a directory. I have an idea how to do it, but there's something I can't translate from common sense into a bash script.

I can list the files sorted by date with 'ls -c /whatever/path' and get the number of files with 'ls /whatever/path | wc -w'. Now all I have to do is set a variable with its value of whatever is the last word 'ls -c' outputs, or word number [number of files]. How exactly can I do that?

Thanks in advance, if I made enough sense to get an answer

macemoneta · 04-13-2006, 06:58 AM

Using tail:

Code:

ls -tc /whatever/path                           | \
   tail -n1                                     | \
   awk '{print "rm \"/whatever/path/" $1 "\""}' | \
   bash

addy86 · 04-13-2006, 07:01 AM

The following code will set the value of f to the name of the oldest file in /whatever/path.

Code:

f=`ls -1c /whatever/path | tail -n1`

Note: the option for ls is a "one", not an "ell".

nitroid · 04-13-2006, 07:08 AM

Thank you, that helped a lot.