this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
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Linux Mint

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Just started with linux mint, need help with a command (feddit.nl)
submitted 6 hours ago by skaarl@feddit.nl to c/linuxmint@lemmy.ml
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As the title says, I just started with linux mint and am falling in love with bash scripts ๐Ÿ˜ Actually I'm not sure if it's considered a script, but I want to delete the last 2 files in all subfolders in a folder. So far I've (after great effort) got the terminal to list the files, but I want to delete them. Here is how I get them listed:

for f in *; do ls $f | tail -n 2; done

All their names come satisfyingly up in the terminal. Now what? I tried adding | xargs rm but that didn't delete them. I also tried something with find command but that didn't work either. Some folders have 3 items, so I want to delete #2 and 3. Some folders have 15 items so I want to delete #14 and 15. Folders are arranged by name, so it's always the last 2 that I want to delete.

It's frustrating to be sooooo clooooose, but also very fun. Any help is appreciated!

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[โ€“] huf@hexbear.net 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

this will break pretty badly if you have filenames with spaces or newlines in them. so to make this actually robust, you now get to learn about find -print0, xargs -0, and why you always, always need to add "" around variables in bash.

[โ€“] skaarl@feddit.nl 1 points 48 minutes ago (1 children)

Can find be used with tail?

Thank you for the tips, but now I'm getting "Cannot remove: No such file or directory" all the way down! The files are there, I see them, they come up in the terminal, but for some reason xargs rm does not want to delete them. When I put the -f flag, rm doesn't give an error but the files are still there! wtf

[โ€“] huf@hexbear.net 1 points 41 minutes ago

find can be used with tail, but if you're doing nul-delimited stuff (-print0, -0), then you'll want tail to run in nul-delimited mode too (-z apparently).

or you can say "fuck files with newlines in them, i aint supporting that shit", and then you just need the "" to still support filenames with spaces.