Myujth

I want to write a shell script that recursively finds the largest files with .log extension and lists them out. It has to further ask for the confirmation to remove them. If confirmed, it has to delete that file. I'm new to shell scripting and the closest I got to was this:

#!/bin/bash
cd /
find . -name "*.log" -type f -exec du -sh + | sort -rh | head -n 10

This lists out top 10 .log files(largest file first). But, I've no clue how to continue from here. How do I parse this list and ask for the confirmation for removing each file and proceed accordingly?
please help

Try

rm -i $(find . -name "*.log" -type f -exec du -sh + | sort -rh | head -n 10)

Basically, taking the output of your find command and using it with "rm -i" The "rm -i" forces the rm command to be interactive. It will prompt you if you want to remove a file.

Hope this helps.

If you make use of the printf function within find, you can easily list all files and sort them according to their size:

find . -iname '*log' -printf "%s %p" | sort -z -k1rn

We use here the as a line terminator to avoid any issues with possible "funny" filenames. This output can now be piped to a simple while loop that does the queries:

find . -iname '*log' -printf "%s %p" | sort -z -k1rn 
 | while read -r -d $'' size file; do
 echo "size: $size"
 echo "file: $file"
 while true; do
 read -p "Do you wish to delete this file (y/n) or quit (q)?" ynq
 case "$ynq" in
 [Yy]* ) rm "$file" ;;
 [Nn]* ) continue ;;
 [Qq]* ) exit ;;
 * ) echo "Please answer yes/no or quit.";;
 esac
 done
 done