Date: Sun, 07 May 2000 19:10:35 -0700 From: Doug Barton <DougB@gorean.org> To: Steve Price <sprice@hiwaay.net> Cc: Darren Wyn Rees <merlin@netlink.co.uk>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: "rm -rf *" - "argument list too long" Message-ID: <3916221B.865C810B@gorean.org> References: <Pine.OSF.4.21.0005071911060.3613-100000@fly.HiWAAY.net>
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Steve Price wrote:
>
> 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. :)
Most of the proposed solutions would work, but the ones like this
suffer from having to spawn a new process for each file. Depending on
how many files are in the directory, this could take a very long time
(where "long time" is relative of course). A little shell manipulation
goes a long way here.
Doug
--
"Live free or die"
- State motto of my ancestral homeland, New Hampshire
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