Mageia forum

As the heading says, I want to delete the 10 oldest files (according to access time) in a directory. I've tried the following:

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for a in `ls -u|tail`;do rm "$a";done

but that doesn't work if there is spaces in the filenames.

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ls -u |tail |while read a; do rm -f "$a"; done

Of course, be safe when removing stuff.
Your version does not work because the backticks phrase is inline replaced by the output of its commands, coalescing all newlines and other whitespace to single spaces.

Mayavimmer wrote:

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ls -u |tail |while read a; do rm -f "$a"; done

Of course, be safe when removing stuff.
Your version does not work because the backticks phrase is inline replaced by the output of its commands, coalescing all newlines and other whitespace to single spaces.

Thanks. The only thing I wanted more was to get prompted for each deletion. I googled a bit more and found that zsh is your friend:

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rm *(Oa[1,10])

Simply don't use -f, or explicitly use rm -i, which is the default - that way it's interactively, and asks you for every file.