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.

this is my current solution; I use Obsidian to manage my notes and I sync the folder with Syncthing. I still use Google Keep though for its whiteboard tool; is there a better app for that?

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!

I agree in theory, but in practice, when Google dropped RSS and XMPP support it took most of my friends with it, which is what started this mess in the first place. I’m actually not a fan of mastodon; feels too ambitious to start a new protocol without a killer app. RSS and XMPP are extensible protocols and I really just want modern support for those.