Won’t this delete the two newest files, as opposed to everything except the two newest files?

I just looked up the man page, and actually head -n -2 means “everything up to but not including the last two lines”, so this should always leave two files remaining.

Ah! This is a shell pipe! It’s composing several smaller commands together, cool stuff.

• ls -1 is the grep-friendly version of ls, it prints one entry per line, like a shopping list.

• head takes a set number of entries from the head of a list, in this case 2 items. negative two, meaning “all but the last two.”

• xargs takes the incoming pipe and converts it into extra arguments, in this case applying those arguments to rm.

So, combined, this says “list all the .dump files, pick the first two, all but the last two, and delete them.” Presumably the first are the oldest ones and the last are the newest, if the .dump files are named chronologically.

I agree with you but your tone is way too violent, we should be helping people learn from their mistakes, not infantilizing them.

Hear hear! I thought I didn’t like the fediverse because Mastodon did such an awful job selling it to me. “Oh, I can’t view other instances’ local timelines without making accounts on them? What’s even the point of federation then?” But on Lemmy you can easily browse communities outside your own instance. So it’s not the fediverse’s fault, Mastodon just doesn’t have a clear audience.

And yeah, I can see how a lot of Mastodon’s features are “privacy-focused”, but I think it does TOO good a job, it’s so private that you can’t find anything!