Question

I’m trying to clean up some directories that are all named in sequence 1001, 1002, 1003 and I can’t seem to get this script to work to delete directories with a value less than a number

Contents of the DIR

1000 1001 1002 1003 1004 1005 1006 1007 1008 1009 1010 1011 1012 1013 1014

My command

for i in `ls`; do if (( $i < 1011 )) then echo rm $i -rf; done

but I get the error

-su: syntax error near unexpected token `then'

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

for i in *; do [ $i -lt 1011 ] && rm -fr $i; done

does the job.

Note: this really removes the files and does not just print the remove commands.