I'm trying to create a one-liner which should remove excess files from dir to save it from consuming too much space.
ls -r --sort=time | head -${{ls | wc -l} - n} | xargs rm -f
n should stand for number of files I want to keep in directory.
I'm doing something wrong here and can't figure out what. Can someone help please?
That ${{...}} looks vaguely like TCL or something. It is certainly not valid shell script.
In Bash (but not in Bourne shell) you can use (( ... )) for artithmetic expression, which I guess is what you want the "- n" to do.
The syntax for process substitution is $(ls | wc -l) with round parentheses.
Merging these two, you might end up with something like (($(ls | wc -l) - n)) but you really should not be parsing ls output anyway. Look at one of the many, many duplicates of this question for better approaches.
( ls -t | head -n 25 ; ls ) | sort | uniq -u | sed -e 's,.*,"&",g' | xargs rm
Done the trick for me.
Delete all but the most recent X files in bash <-- here
Thanks for reply.
