Linux Mint @lemmy.ml skaarl @feddit.nl 2w ago

Just started with linux mint, need help with a command

As the title says, I just started with linux mint and am falling in love with bash scripts 😍 Actually I'm not sure if it's considered a script, but I want to delete the last 2 files in all subfolders in a folder. So far I've (after great effort) got the terminal to list the files, but I want to delete them. Here is how I get them listed:

for f in *; do ls $f | tail -n 2; done

All their names come satisfyingly up in the terminal. Now what? I tried adding | xargs rm but that didn't delete them. I also tried something with find command but that didn't work either. Some folders have 3 items, so I want to delete #2 and 3. Some folders have 15 items so I want to delete #14 and 15. Folders are arranged by name, so it's always the last 2 that I want to delete.

It's frustrating to be sooooo clooooose, but also very fun. Any help is appreciated!

EDIT: Thanks for the awesome help guys! The next part of this is to move all the .html files into one folder (named "done"), prepending their name with an integer. So far I got:

n=1; for f in *; do find ./"$f" -type f | sort | xargs mv done/"$n$f"; n=$((n+1)); done

but that is... not really doing anything. The closest I have gotten so far is some error like

mv: Missing destination file operand

Any help is again appreciated!

33 comments

ITT: I find out I may not be the power user I think I am.
- Haha. I used to wite long and intricate BATCH files for MS DOS to automate all sorts of shit back in the 1990s. Bash is more powerful but much the same thing.
  
  I've written a few tiny ones but I'm too old for that shit these days :)
  
  My work is all windows based, I only put on the Linux hat while I'm at home. Powershell is fun when it's not broken and my commands don't shit the bed
- I've been "daily driving" Linux for over 15 years, and I've learned a lot about configuration files, but I've never learned how to program anything. Couldn't write a "for loop" to save my life.
  
  I think config files, yaml, and xml are reasonable pieces of code. I think program scripting is absolutely unreasonable fluff.
be careful using rm in a loop and/or with variable arguments, things can go very wrong :)

when i'm writing a complicated command line involving rm i often write and run it first with echo in place of rm just to be sure i am getting the results i expect. also when i re-run it actually using rm, i tend to use the -v option (which tells rm to print what it is doing) to reassure myself that i've just deleted what i wanted to and nothing else.
- Great tip, thank you!
Just fyi, if you add a second question that you want people to see, you might avoid adding it as an edit and just post a new question instead or ideally include it all in the first post to begin with.

Out of curiosity, what did you end up using for the first part? I know how I would have done it, but I'm self taught and always interested in learning new/different ways to do things.

For the bonus EDIT question, are you moving all html files from any subdirectory under your current directory? If so, that's much easier, but I would avoid putting your done folder under the scope that you're scanning against as well as ensuring no files have matching names to avoid overwriting files already moved.

All in all, I'm sure you can get there, but it does also help to have more information up front so we can provide clearer help.
- Ok, thanks for the tip. I'm still getting used to Lemmy.
  
  I ended up using
  
  for f in *; do find ./"$f" -type f | sort | tail -n 2 | xargs -n 1 rm; done
  
  and it worked perfectly. For the bonus question, I'm moving the html files from 127 subfolders. They are the only content of the subfolders. I want to prepend an integer to each and copy them to a different folder, so instead of
  
  folder1/file1
  
  folder1/file2
  
  folder2/file1
  
  folder2/file2
  
  folder2/file3
  
  I'll have
  
  001file1
  
  002file2
  
  003file1
  
  004file2
  
  005file3
xargs rm -rf?
- for f in *; do ls $f | tail -n 2 | xargs rm -rf; done
  
  You mean like that? rm -rf followed by a question mark does not inspire confidence XD
  
  For clarity, be careful with that -rf combo of flags. As another commenter mentioned, -r means recursive, which will delete directories and their contents. You're talking about deleting files. If you do not want directories and their contents removed, DO NOT use the -r flag.
  
  Additionally, for safety you can add the i flag to be promoted to confirm each removal. It may be tedious depending on the number of files, but it may also save you from deleting files and/or directories you don't want deleted.
  
  yes. that's what I suggested.. the question mark was there to ask you if you tried that :-D I'm at work, pretty busy :-D I hope you read the rm manual.
  
  -r means recursive
  -f means force, which will delete the files/directories without interaction

33 comments