Question

I need to write a recursive script to delete all folders in a subfolder named ‘date-2012-01-01_12_30’ but leave the two latest.

/var/www/temp/updates/ then hundreds of folders by ‘date’ and by ‘code’

e.g.

/var/www/temp/updates/2012-01-01/temp1/date-2012-01-_12_30
/var/www/temp/updates/2012-01-01/temp1/date-2012-02-_13_30
/var/www/temp/updates/2012-01-01/temp1/date-2013-11-_12_30
/var/www/temp/updates/2012-01-01/temp2/date-2012-01-_12_30

I was thinking about using a find to get the folder but unsure how to know what folders I can delete as the script will have to know how date- folders are in that subfolder and which ones are the latest ones

Hmm, any help would be great?

Answer 1

This should work:

find /var/www/temp/updates/ -type d -name "date-*" -printf '%T@ %p\n' | sort -n | head -n -2 | cut -f2- | xargs rm -rf

find prints out the directory paths along with their last modification times. This is then sorted and all but the last two are deleted.