As the title says, I just started with linux mint and am falling in love with bash scripts 😍 Actually I’m not sure if it’s considered a script, but I want to delete the last 2 files in all subfolders in a folder. So far I’ve (after great effort) got the terminal to list the files, but I want to delete them. Here is how I get them listed:

for f in *; do ls $f | tail -n 2; done

All their names come satisfyingly up in the terminal. Now what? I tried adding | xargs rm but that didn’t delete them. I also tried something with find command but that didn’t work either. Some folders have 3 items, so I want to delete #2 and 3. Some folders have 15 items so I want to delete #14 and 15. Folders are arranged by name, so it’s always the last 2 that I want to delete.

It’s frustrating to be sooooo clooooose, but also very fun. Any help is appreciated!



EDIT: Thanks for the awesome help guys! The next part of this is to move all the .html files into one folder (named “done”), prepending their name with an integer. So far I got:

n=1; for f in *; do find ./"$f" -type f | sort | xargs mv done/"$n$f"; n=$((n+1)); done

but that is… not really doing anything. The closest I have gotten so far is some error like

mv: Missing destination file operand

Any help is again appreciated!

  • huf [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 hours ago

    find can be used with tail, but if you’re doing nul-delimited stuff (-print0, -0), then you’ll want tail to run in nul-delimited mode too (-z apparently).

    or you can say “fuck files with newlines in them, i aint supporting that shit”, and then you just need the “” to still support filenames with spaces.

    • skaarl@feddit.nlOP
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      8 hours ago

      Hmm, thanks. It’s gonna take a while to unpack this ':D

      There are no newlines in the names, and all spaces have been replaced with a dash.