Bash Script to Cron for Deleting Old Log Files

nice. don't know if disqus will properly display the following but here's a slight simplification that doesn't require alphabetical naming convention. prunes all but the 40 newest. only works with GNU tail and doesn't handle filenames with spaces:

MAX_FILES=41 #needs to be incremented by 1
ls -1t | tail --lines=+$MAX_FILES | xargs rm -f

this doesn't maintain a specific number, but another approach I've used to pruning files is deleting those that haven't been accessed or modified in, say, 30 days. access time is probably more appropriate but can be unreliable depending on what sort of periodic scripts your machine is running, so I often fall back to mod time. this will handle almost any kind of strange embedded character. test with "-print" instead of "-exec rm {} +"

find /dirname -type f -mtime +30 -exec rm {} +

Ah, this is way simpler, but I don't think I have GNU tail on the server in
question. We should do a "beers and bash tricks" meetup sometime soon.

using sed instead of tail (depending on yr edition of sed). if you lose the MAX_FILES variable and just hardcode 41, you can use single-quotes and skip escaping the sed operators (unescaped version on second line).

ls -1t | sed -n "$MAX_FILES,\$p" | xargs rm -f
ls -1t | sed -n '41,$p' | xargs rm -f

or

ls -1t | sed "$MAX_FILES,\$\!d" | xargs rm -f
ls -1t | sed '41,$!d' | xargs rm -f

beers and bash? awesome.

Also vodka and vim?