Reputation: 1243

Bash scripting: Deleting the oldest directory

I want to look for the oldest directory (inside a directory), and delete it. I am using the following:

rm -R $(ls -1t | tail -1)

ls -1t | tail -1 does indeed gives me the oldest directory, the the problem is that it is not deleting the directory, and that it also list files.

How could I please fix that?

Upvotes: 6

Answers (4)

Reputation: 11473


find directory_name -type d -printf "%TY%Tm%Td%TH%TM%TS %p\n" | sort -nr | tail -1 | cut -d" " -f2 | xargs -n1 echo rm -Rf

You should remove the echo before the rm if it produces the right results

Upvotes: 0

Reputation: 5393

rm -R "$(find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -printf '%T@\t%p\n' | sort -r | tail -n 1 | sed 's/[0-9]*\.[0-9]*\t//')"

This works also with directory whose name contains spaces, tabs or starts with a "-".

Upvotes: 8

Reputation: 455000

This is not pretty but it works:

rm -R $(ls -lt | grep '^d' | tail -1  | tr " " "\n" | tail -1)

Upvotes: 3

Reputation: 12806

rm -R $(ls -tl | grep '^d' | tail -1 | cut -d' ' -f8)

Upvotes: 0