From owner-freebsd-questions  Sun May  7 17:12:45 2000
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Date: Sun, 7 May 2000 19:12:30 -0500 (CDT)
From: Steve Price <sprice@hiwaay.net>
To: Doug Barton <DougB@gorean.org>
Cc: Darren Wyn Rees <merlin@netlink.co.uk>,
	freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: "rm -rf *" - "argument list too long"
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On Sun, 7 May 2000, Doug Barton wrote:

# 	First, ignore the overly complicated and potentially dangerous answers
# so far on this thread. :) Second, think about it for a minute. If "*"
# provides a list that's too long for rm to handle, why not break it up
# into smaller chunks? For example, if your files mainly have alpha
# characters in their names, do something like:
# 
# rm [a-c]*
# 
# Starting with larger chunks, and going smaller as needed till the error
# messages disappear. 

Something like this doesn't work?

	ls * | xargs rm

Seems simple enough and should do it all in one pass. :)

-steve



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