How to delete the files from AWS S3 except the recently 5 added/updated files?

Question

I could fetch the recent 5 files added or updated by:

aws s3 ls s3://somebucket/ --recursive | sort | tail -n 5 | awk '{print $4}'

Now how do I keep these files and delete all other?

Answer 1

There are 2 options for you to use. 

1. The first option requires the names of the last 5 files
2. Second option is a shell script which you cna run to do the same

The first option is this:

Use --exclude option with the aws s3 rm command as show below:

aws s3 rm s3://somebucket/ --recursive --exclude "bucketname/1.txt" --exclude "bucketname/2.txt" --exclude "bucketname/3.txt" --exclude "bucketname/4.txt" --exclude "bucketname/5.txt"

Use this script to get all files but the last 5 uploaded files:

aws s3 ls s3://bucketname/ --recursive | sort | head -n -5 | while read -r line ; do

    echo "Removing ${line}"

    aws s3 rm s3://bucketname/${line}

done

line - The number of lines (objects) to be removed

bucketname - provide the name of the bucket with the objects

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