How do I delete all but 10 newest files in Linux?

Question

I'm trying to keep a directory full of log files manageable. Nightly, I want to delete all but the 10 most recent. How can I do this in a single command?

Answer 1

For a portable and reliable solution, try this:

ls -1tr | head -n -10 | xargs -d '\n' rm -f --

The tail -n -10 syntax in one of the other answers doesn't seem to work everywhere (i.e., not on my RHEL5 systems).

And using $() or `` on the command line of rm runs the risk of

1. splitting file names with whitespace, and
2. exceeding the maximum commandline character limit.

xargs fixes both of these problems because it'll automatically figure out how many args it can pass within the character limit, and with the -d '\n' it will only split at the line boundary of the input. Technically this can still cause problems for filenames with a newline in them, but that's far less common than filenames with spaces, and the only way around the newlines would be a lot more complicated, probably involving at least awk, if not perl.

If you don't have xargs (old AIX systems, maybe?) you could make it a loop:

ls -1tr | head -n -10 | while IFS= read -r f; do
  rm -f "$f"
done

This will be a bit slower because it spawns a separate rm for each file, but will still avoid caveats 1 and 2 above (but still suffers from newlines in file names).

Answer 2

The code you'd want to include in your script is

 rm -f $(ls -1t /path/to/your/logs/ | tail -n +11)

The -1 (numeric one) option prints each file on a single line, to be safe. The -f option to rm tells it to ignore non-existent files for when ls returns nothing.

Answer 3

Apparently parsing ls is evil.

If each file is created daily and you want to keep files created within the last 10 days you can do:

find /path/to/files -mtime 10 -delete

Or if each file is created arbitrarily:

find /path/to/files -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf '%Ts\t%P\n' | sort -n | head -n -10 | cut -f 2- | xargs rm -rf

Answer 4

A tool like logrotate does this for you. It makes log management much easier. You can also include additional cleanup routines shuch as halo sugggested.

Answer 5

I modified Isaac's approach a little bit.

It now works with a desired path:

ls -d -1tr /path/to/folder/* | head -n -10 | xargs -d '\n' rm -f

Answer 6

From here:

#! /bin/sh
# keepnewest
#
# Simple directory trimming tool to handle housekeeping
# Scans a directory and deletes all but the N newest files
#
# Usage: cleanup <dir> <number of files to keep>
#
# v 1.0 Piers Goodhew 1/mar/2007. No rights retained.


if [ $# -ne 2 ]; then
  echo 1>&2 "Usage: $0 <dir> <number of files to keep>"
  exit 1
fi

cd $1
files_in_dir=`ls | wc -l`
files_to_delete=`expr $files_in_dir - $2`
if [ $files_to_delete -gt 0 ]; then
  ls -t | tail -n $files_to_delete | xargs rm
  if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
    echo "An error ocurred deleting the files"
    exit 1
  else
    echo "$files_to_delete file(s) deleted."
  fi
else
  echo "nothing to delete!"
fi

Answer 7

In Bash you can try:

ls -1t | (i=0; while read f; do
  if [ $i -lt 10 ]; then
    ((i++))
    continue
  else
    rm -f "$f"
  fi
done)

This skips the 10 newest als deletes the rest. logrotate may be better, I just want to correct the wrong shell related answers.

Answer 8

not sure this will help anyone but to avoid potential issues with wonky characters i just used ls to perform the sort but then use the files inode for the delete.

For current directory, this keeps the most recent 10 files based on modification time.

ls -1tri | awk '{print $1}' | head -n -10 | xargs -n1 -t -Iinode find . -inum inode -exec rm -i {} \;

Answer 9

I agree that parsing ls is evil!

Ensure only the last 5 files are kept in the /srv/backups path.

find /srv/backups -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf '%Ts\t%P\n' \
    | sort -rn \
    | tail -n +6 \
    | cut -f2- \
    | xargs -r r

Answer 10

I needed an elegant solution for the busybox (router), all xargs or array solutions were useless to me - no such command available there. find and mtime is not the proper answer as we are talking about 10 items and not necessarily 10 days. Espo's answer was the shortest and cleanest and likely the most unversal one.

Error with spaces and when no files are to be deleted are both simply solved the standard way:

rm "$(ls -td *.tar | awk 'NR>7')" 2>&-

Bit more educational version: We can do it all if we use awk differently. Normally, I use this method to pass (return) variables from the awk to the sh. As we read all the time that can not be done, I beg to differ: here is the method.

Example for .tar files with no problem regarding the spaces in the filename. To test, replace "rm" with the "ls".

eval $(ls -td *.tar | awk 'NR>7 { print "rm \"" $0 "\""}')

Explanation:

ls -td *.tar lists all .tar files sorted by the time. To apply to all the files in the current folder, remove the "d *.tar" part

awk 'NR>7... skips the first 7 lines

print "rm \"" $0 "\"" constructs a line: rm "file name"

eval executes it

Since we are using rm, I would not use the above command in a script! Wiser usage is:

(cd /FolderToDeleteWithin && eval $(ls -td *.tar | awk 'NR>7 { print "rm \"" $0 "\""}'))

In the case of using ls -t command will not do any harm on such silly examples as: touch 'foo " bar' and touch 'hello * world'. Not that we ever create files with such names in real life!

Sidenote. If we wanted to pass a variable to the sh this way, we would simply modify the print:

print "VarName="$1

to set the variable VarName to the value of $1. Multiple variables can be created in one go. This VarName becomes a normal sh variable and can be normally used in a script or shell afterwards. So, to create variables with awk and give them back to the shell:

eval $(ls -td *.tar | awk 'NR>7 { print "VarName="$1 }'); echo "$VarName"

Answer 11

Based on Isaac Freeman response, but working on any directory:

ls -1tr $PATH_TO_DELETE/* | head -n -10 | xargs -d '\n' rm -f --

You can also set a prefix, like $PATH_TO_DELETE/testFi*

If you use * after the PATH ls will output absolute file names, at least in "my" bash :)

Answer 12

On my Synology NAS I slightly modified @h0tw1r3's answer to make it work in a scheduled task and to handle possible blank and/or newline characters in the file name by zero-terminating the generated strings:

find /path/to/backup/folder -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf '%Ts\t' -print0 \
| sort -rnz \
| tail -n +11 -z \
| cut -f2- -z \
| xargs -0 -r rm -f

IMPORTANT: This will delete any matching files! I strongly recommend doing a test run first by replacing the last command xargs -0 -r rm -f with xargs -0 which will echo the matching files instead of deleting them.

A short explanation of each step:

1. find /path/to/backup/folder -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf '%Ts\t' -print0
   
   Find all regular files (-type f) in the backup folder without traversing any subfolders (-maxdepth 1), print (-printf) the Unix time (%Ts) of the last modification followed by a tab character (\t, used in step 4) and the full file name followed by a null character (-print0).
   
   
2. sort -rnz
   
   Sort the zero-terminated items (-z) from the previous step using a numerical comparison (-n) and reverse the order (-r). The result is a list of all backups sorted by their last modification date in descending order.
   
   
3. tail -n +11 -z
   
   Print the last lines (tail) from the previous step starting from line 11 (-n +11) considering each line as zero-terminated (-z). This excludes the newest 10 files (by modification date) from the remaining steps.
   
   
4. cut -f2- -z
   
   Cut each line from the second field until the end (-f2-) treating each line as zero-terminaded (-z) to obtain a list containing the full path to each backup older than 10 days.
   
   
5. xargs -r -0 rm -f
   
   Take the zero-terminated (-0) items from the previous step (xargs), and, if there are any (-r avoids running the command passed to xargs if there are no nonblank characters), force delete (rm -f) them.

Answer 13

the solutions with

find /Users/test/delete/*.zip -mtime +10 -exec rm {} \;

have one caveeat:

if you do daily backups and run this command before writing backups to folder where store backupfiles (exmaple qcow2 files), and do for longer time no backups, maybe 12 or longer days the command will erase "ALL" kept old backups beacuse they are older then "10" days....

i think a method like this (listed above) :

ls -1tr $PATH_TO_DELETE/* | head -n -10 | xargs -d '\n' rm -f --

is the better way in this case

just my 2 cent

Answer 14

You can delete file with specific name pattern and numbers of day old using

find /Users/test/delete/*.zip -mtime +10 -exec rm {} \;

Above command deletes files matching pattern /Users/test/delete/*.zip and which are 10 days older.