Question

I have a directory that contains numerically named subdirectories ( eg. 1, 2, 3, 32000, 43546 ). I need to delete all directories over a certain number. For example, I need to delete all subdirectories that have a name that is numerically larger than 14234. Can this be done with a single command line action?

rm -r /directory/subdirectories_over_14234 ( how can I do this? )

Answer 1

Well you can do a bash for loop instruction so as to iterate over the directory filename and use the test command then after extracting the target number of the file name.

Should be something like this :

for $file in /your/path 
do
   #extract number here with any text processing command (ed ?)
   if test [$name -leq your_value]
   then
      rm -R $file
   fi
done