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.