Question

I’ve got a git repo, and I have revisions of a file, dated with a unix timestamp. I want to get the oldest file (I.E. the one with the smallest timestamp) and remove it.

Is this possible with Bash alone and if so, how?

Answer 1

If you want to find the oldest file in a directory tree, you can do something like this:

ls -tr $(find . -type f) | head -1

This works as long as the number of files isn’t too large. It’s even easier if you’re willing to delete “all files older than a certain number of days”. For example, if you want to get rid of anything older than 5 days:

find . -type f -mtime +5 -print | xargs rm

You wouldn’t want to run this verbatim; you’d want to provide the appropriate filters to find — or root it at the approriate directory — so that you’re only deleting files you really want to delete.

Obviously you’ll need to commit these deletes to git as well. You could do something like this:

find . -type f -mtime +5 -print | xargs git rm
git commit -m "deleted things"

…although note that this could commit changes that you’ve previously staged with “git add”. Some things are best done by hand.