Comments on: /bin/rm annoying limitation: Argument list too long

By: werkun

werkun — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 22:55:45 +0000

Very useful when you wanna remove 170000 files, thanks a lot!

By: ???

??? — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:49:49 +0000

thanx for sharing to the netiziens

By: loooloow

loooloow — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:08:31 +0000

thanks to much really nice …. but i need your help in this question
The goal of this assignment is to write a shell script to replace the rm command andprovide undelete capability similar to MS-DOS.Write a shell program to duplicate the UNIX rm command with the following features:1.It will have a switch -i that will act in the same manner as in the rm command.2.Instead of deleting the files, it will move them to a wastebasket directory. If thefile already exists in the wastebasket directory, then the existing file (in thewastebasket) will have the version number zero appended to it and the newlydeleted file will have version number one appended to it. If the version numbersetup is already in use for that file then the newest one will simply have the nextversion number in the series appended to it. It’s your choice as to what system touse for this. Just be sure that it is a unique system and will not be part of anynormal file naming convention you might use.3.It will have a switch -c that will clear the entire wastebasket after asking forconfirmation. The -i and -c switches may be combined to ask for confirmation onindividual files.Don’t forget that wildcards and multiple files are allowed on the command line. Theswitches when combined may be in any order but must be before any filenames. Yourprogram must also catch any operator errors.
i hope to answer me in my email
thanks …

By: Eligio

Eligio — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 12:08:10 +0000

command works on my 7k+ swf files, thanks for the solution.

By: Burg

Burg — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:14:34 +0000

cd /var/spool/mqueue/
find . -name ‘dfm3*’ | xargs rm

By: David Newcomb

David Newcomb — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 19:00:14 +0000

Often the reason why there are loads of files in a folder is because it is a logs folder and you haven’t been doing your house keeping properly. In these situations you rarely want to delete all of them. Usually you want to keep the last 30 days worth of files. So find is a far better solution, or bigdel documented here:

http://www.bigsoft.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/08/09/rm-argument-list-too-long

By: Shell parameter size limitation: Argument list too long | Eric Cheng’s Journal

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 20:23:15 +0000

[...] then, I found another hint (the comments are the useful part), and tried: ls post*.jpg | xargs chmod [...]

By: kep1269

kep1269 — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 20:17:49 +0000

Thanks Marius..

I found that there is a limitation on mtime due to it having to sort… My problem stems from there being roughly 250,000 files in the directory.

I ended up just piping ls -rt to a file.sh and modding that to rm the files… took a long time, but worked.

By: - Marius -

- Marius - — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:49:14 +0000

kp1269: that should work just by adding something like:
find . â€˜*.wrkâ€™ -mtime 30 -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f

If for some reason that doesn’t work for you, you might want to try -mmin +xx and translate in minutes the time you need. hth.

By: kp1269

kp1269 — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 22:54:13 +0000

I have used

find /some/directory -name â€˜*.wrkâ€™ -print0 | xargs -n1000 -0 rm -f
and
find . â€˜*.wrkâ€™ -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f

Is there any way to do this with -mtime to delet files older than sya 30 days? (i can’t get it to work)