Re: OT: Alternatives to ls for sorting files by modification time

[Holger Rauch <Holger.Rauch@heitec.de>]

Hi Tom!

Thanks for your quick reply!

On Wed, 25 Sep 2002, Tom Cook wrote:

> [...]
> All I can say is... it works for me.  How many files in the directory
> where you're having this fail?  It works for me in /usr/lib.
> 
> # ls /usr/lib -lt1 | wc -l
>   841

I suspect the problem is not $NUM_OF_FILES since that is set to only
50. To me, the problem seems to be the sheer number of files returned by
ls:

ls -lt1 $BACKUP_DIR/*.arc | wc -l

   2708

That number will grow considerably since these .arc files are Oracle
archive files and 4-5 of these files are created *per minute*.

> [...] 
> otherwise you will get a lot of files with names like '-rw-r-----'
> that rm can't delete for some mysterious reason.  Maybe that was your
> problem?

No, I don't get the permission settings since I used "ls -lt1" which is
different from "ls -lt". When it comes to "ls -lt", I absolutely agree
with you. Even though the ls's man page is not very specific on "-1", it
seems to strip the other info returned by "-l" away, which is what I want.
The awk you added of course also works, if I only used "ls -lt".

Thanks for your suggestion!

Greetings,

	Holger