I've installed moreutils on several hosts now, and each time I find a new use for one of those tools I'm very happy.
Unfortunately I suspect that too many of us continue to hoard our little shell script archives, continuing to re-invent wheels with slightly different colours, shapes, and sizes.
I suspect I've just re-invented the wheel again, writing nrecent, because there seems to be no "simple" way of doing the job of keeping the most N recent files in a directory.
I guess the standard approach would be to use "ls", or "find", to find all files in a directory, reverse-sorted by mtime, then use "tail +n2 to skip the ones you want to keep, removing the rest.
Anyway nrecent - keep the most recent N files in a directory:
nrecent --keep 20 /tmp
Written as naively/hurridly as possible as it solved, and continues to solve, a real need.
ObQuote: "You're like the drummer from REO Speedwagon. Nobody knows who you are. " - Employee of the month
Tags: hacks, moreutils, nrecent 3 comments