Date: Sun, 7 May 2000 21:46:35 +0100 From: Ben Smithurst <ben@scientia.demon.co.uk> To: Darren Wyn Rees <merlin@netlink.co.uk> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: "rm -rf *" - "argument list too long" Message-ID: <20000507214635.A79359@strontium.scientia.demon.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <20000507201410.M540@netlink.co.uk> References: <20000507201410.M540@netlink.co.uk>
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Darren Wyn Rees wrote: > I'm in a directory with a tonne of files I wish to delete. > I type "rm -rf *", but it won't work, it gives "/bin/rm: Argument > list too long". So how can I delete these many files ? find . -delete > I can "cd ..", and then "rm -rf <directory name>", and that works. > > However, what if I didn't wish to remove directories. In that > case, what would I do to remove the files ? find . -type f -delete Replace "-delete" with "-print | xargs rm -f" for a more portable version, with only a small amount of extra overhead. > PS. (I'm finding it takes some getting used to putting > the operands to many commands immediately after the command. > Why is this so with FreeBSD? With Linux I can type 'rm * -rf' etc.) uh.... If you can really do that with Linux, that's severely weird. It's just common sense as far as I can see to have the options first, I guess it's because that's what I'm used to. -- Ben Smithurst / ben@scientia.demon.co.uk / PGP: 0x99392F7D To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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