This is driving me mad. I know there's going to be a simple solution that I'll smack myself in the head for once I see it!
I have a directory containing full backups ("full"). I have another directory containing incremental backups ("inc").
When a new full backup succeeds, I want to purge files in the inc directory, but I want to keep all incremental backups since the most recent full backup (which I will just have created), but since the one before that as well.
i.e. I want to delete all files in inc older than the second oldest file in full.
I'd like to see an answer that will work for ksh as well as bash please. (Two different answers OK as well.)
Thanks in advance!
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Thank you all!
I forgot to take into account that some backups would be striped to multiple files per backup, but I fixed that by ignoring the timestamp used with the backup just made.
Also find complained unless I prefixed the path to the full directory before the inner ls command.
After thinking it through carefully, I realise I *did* in fact want all inc files deleted that were older than the second *newest* full backup, so thank you yuzh for making me think about that one!
If I didn't add '-type f' to the find, it reported the directory name too, which rm rightly complained about, nor would I want to delete it.
My filenames are pretty large and so only appear one to a line, but the -1 (one, not ell, which threw me for a bit) would guarantee this.
For the sake of anyone searching this later, my final command was:
find ${inc_dir} -type f ! -newer ${dump_dir}/`ls -1rt -I*${date_time}* ${dump_dir} | tail -1`-print | xargs rm
Thank you all, I learned something from every response.
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by: tfewsterPosted on 2005-02-25 at 00:25:31ID: 13400965
shell-independant:
find /inc -newer `ls -lrt /full |tail -2 |head -1|awk '{print $NF}'` -exec rm {} \;