[ale] THANKS to all who replied to "ls -rt | rm -i" problem, BUT...

[Courtney Thomas]

Geoffrey,

THANK YOU to you, and ALL ELSE, that have helped.

I must say... I'm surprised that something so elementary as file 
creation date... is so recondite and intractable. I would have thought 
that, long ago, this would have been made amenable.

Courtney



Geoffrey wrote:
> Geoffrey wrote:
> 
>>Courtney Thomas wrote:
>>
>>>Personally finding awk awkward...no wait,...impenetrable, if $NF is the 
>>>last field, and the 6th field is desired to sort on, $NF - 
>>><wanted_field#> since $NF is last, can you say "$NF + 5" OR "$NF - 
>>><wanted_field#>"... to get to the wanted date field ?
>>
>>Actually NF is the last field number in awk.  Therefore $NF will be the 
>>last field in the string.  You are close, you would actually need to do 
>>something like $(NF - 5) to do math on this value.
> 
> 
> 
> Let me correct that.  NF is the total number of fields for the current 
> record.  Since you reference the fields with numbers ($1 is the first 
> field, $2, is the 2nd..) $NF will get you the last field value.
> 
> It's friday okay?
>