Bash: Delete until a specific file

Question

Hy, suppose you got many files in a folder and you want first to sort it in alphabetic order and then delete all files until a specific file (not including it).

So im searching for a function/command/script/whatever which takes one string as imput and the deletes all files until this file.

I thought of a simple bash-script:

for i in *; do
   if [ "$i" == "input" ]; then
      break;
   fi
   rm "$i"
 done

but this is a quite long solution, and it doesnt work as wanted because the sorting is not specified. Isn't there a shorter one?

Thanks

Answer 1

If you want sorting:

for i in `ls | sort`
do
    if [ "$i" == "input" ]
    then
        break
    fi
    rm "$i"
done

Certainly, this could be made shorter, but this solution is probably the simplest and most readable (which usually matters the most). And this does handle files with spaces correctly now.

Answer 2

This seems to work ($i being the filename up to which to delete)

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f | sort | 
    while read -r line && [[ $line < $i ]]; do 
        echo $line
    done

If you are sure it does what you want, replace the echo command by

rm "$line"

Never pipe ls for processing things. ls isn't made for that task. Use pathname expansion or tools like find.

Example failure case:

$ echo > 'I have fun.mp3'
$ cat $(ls | grep 'have fun')
cat: I: No such file or directory
cat: have: No such file or directory
cat: fun.mp3: No such file or directory

It splits the result of $(...) into words and passes these words as separate arguments. Thus, rm would not see such a name as a whole, but as splitted into its words.

Pathname expansion is done after word splitting, so word splitting does not affect its result anymore. That is why a cat * will correctly handle spaces (or for that purpose, any other characters in the IFS variable).

Answer 3

Try,

rm $(ls | sort | sed '/input/,$d')

First try this without the rm as,

ls | sort | sed '/input/,$d'

Here, input is your regex to catch the filename. Remember, everything after the first match will go!

Answer 4

rm `ls |sed '/pattern/,$d'`

ls output is sorted alphabetically by default.

Replace pattern with a regular expression that matches the first file past the one to delete. Unless there's anything fancy going on, pattern can be just the name of the file to stop deleting on. Or use "^filename$" for pattern to be certain.

As always, test before doing. For example, add "echo" at the start to just print what would be done.

echo rm `ls |sed '/pattern/,$d'`