Entries tagged nrecent

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

Work on my bathroom continues. I had expected it to be complete on Friday but it lookse like the new completion date will be Tuesday or Wednesday.

It will be very nice to have a working shower, and a toilet I don't need to "flush" with a bucket.

The only interesting thing I've been doing is planning on a kernel to support long-term for some poor unfortunate souls who cannot use Debian-based kernels.

I know building, supporting, and maintaining a kernel will be a pain. But at the moment it looks like a valid thing to be suggesting.

Otherwise life goes on. I've been hit by the DIY bug, largely as the result of seeing all the bathroom work going on, and figuring I was going to live with dust/mess anyway - so I've erected some more book-shelves, and ordered a pair of ceiling fans.

The only other thing to report is that I've started deleting emails. (shock!)

I look after a few machines for myself, friends and so on. Each one will send me automated emails at times. I've got them going back years - but no longer:

#
#  Prune old mailboxes.
#
for maildir in .Automated.backups .machines.spotlight .machines.skx; do
   nrecent --keep=150 $HOME/Maildir/${maildir}/cur
done

Another new use for my nrecent tool. (Note: Only delete files from ./cur, to avoid deleting messages I've not read. Maildir is your friend!)

ObQuote: "I'm sorry I'm sweating on you... " - Knocked Up.

Tags: nrecent | 3 comments