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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]