remove old backup files

Question

# find /home/shantanu -name 'my_stops*' | xargs ls -lt | head -2

The command mentioned above will list the latest 2 files having my_stops in it's name. I want to keep these 2 files. But I want to delete all other files starting with "my_stops" from the current directory.

Answer 1

If you create backups on a regular basis, it may be useful to use the -atime option of find so only files older than your last two backups can be selected for deletion.

For daily backups you might use

$ find /home/shantanu -atime +2 -name 'my_stops*' -exec rm {} \;

but a different expression (other than -atime) may suit you better.

In the example I used +2 to mean more than 2 days.

Answer 2

Here is a non-recursive solution:

ls -t my_stops* | awk 'NR>2 {system("rm \"" $0 "\"")}'

Explanation:

• The ls command lists files with the latest 2 on top
• The awk command states that for those lines (NR = number of records, i.e. lines) greater than 2, delete them
• The quote characters are needed just in case the file names have embedded spaces