Need a command to delete all files apart from last file generated

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

I have a directory named (/output). this directory has files in the below format

abc.* , 
xyz*, 
djj*, 
iwe*, 
weewe*, 
rier*, 
3948903ddfgf*

these files are generated at random. what i need to do is. delete all the files of all kinds but keep only the last generated file of eachtime.

the final result will have only 1 type of file for each of the files present in the folder. the file that will be present will be the latest file.

2

You should use command rm -R /output/*

3

lkl i dont want to remove all the files. i just want to keep the last generated file for each type of file.

the above command that you said will delete all the files in my directory.,

(All my files are getting generated so i am unable to properly use mtime or atime option with find)

4

try

#!/bin/bash

cd /output

for f in abc. xyz djj iwe weewe rier 3948903ddfgf; do

# ensure that we pick up a non-blank string 
# (not likely to happen, but if it does we will end up doing rm *)
# this will NOT work if the filenames have newlines in them

  if [ "x$f" != "x" ]
  then
     last=`ls -tr ${f}* |tail -1`
     save="save_$last"
     mv $last $save
     rm ${f}*
     mv $save $last
  fi

done
5 
$ ruby -e '["abc.","xyz","djj""].each{|c| Dir["#{c}*"].sort{|x,y| File.mtime(x)<=>File.mtime(y)}[0..-2].each{|f| File.unlink(f)} } '
6

The below code keep the latest .txt file only

ls -ct *.txt | awk '
BEGIN{ flag=1; }
{
if (flag){
# keep the latest file
flag=0;
} else {
# Remove the old files
print "rm "$1;
}
}
'| sh