Remove the oldest file of a directory

[aleix]

Hi everybody,

I've have a shell script called by crontab every week.
This script makes a tar file of different files, and save this tar file into a directory.

This directory contains 4 tar files, one of every week since I started to execute the script.

Now I would like to automatically remove the oldest tar file of the directory every time the script is invoqued again.

How can I do that??
Can anyone help me??

[Daylung]

this command should do it.

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#rm  `ls -t --color=none | tail -n 1`

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`ls -t --color=none | tail -n 1`

with the " ` " (top left of most keyboards) returns the filename of the oldest file. the "-t" option sorts chronologically (--color=none just ot be safe) then pipe the list to "tail -n 1" which ouputs the last line of whatever you give it, and rm removes the resulting file. To put this in a shell script you should add a line to change to the directory you want, if there are other files in that directory you can use wildcards with ls to just look at the files you want.

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ls -t *.tar.bz2

or something like that. Hope this was helpful.

Oh, and you really don't have to post questions in multiple sections