Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2002 15:40:51 -0300 From: Adrian Mugnolo <adrianm@yahoo-inc.com> To: Derek <derek@durham.net> Cc: Jean-Yves Lefort <jylefort@brutele.be>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Directory containing many files Message-ID: <20020910154051.A2974@jazz.ar.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <018401c258e0$c2165fc0$04fea8c0@motorcity.on.ca>; from derek@durham.net on Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 11:43:06AM -0400 References: <20020910132907.1aabde58.jylefort@brutele.be> <018401c258e0$c2165fc0$04fea8c0@motorcity.on.ca>
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Hi,
> > Can some problems arise by having that many files in one >
> single directory?
>
> I have had issues with (bash) shell globbing. For example the
> command:
>
> rm *
>
> may return:
> argument list too long
Please note that shell patterns get expanded at the command line level,
not the command themselves [everybody knows that -- but takes quite a
while to figure out]. For big lists you can use xargs(1):
ls -1 | xargs rm
Or find(1):
find . -type f -maxdepth 1 -exec rm {} \;
find . -type f -maxdepth 1 -delete
[Not using some primaries with find(1) can produce unwanted results --
it's recursive unless told otherwise.]
This comes specially handy for makefiles and scripting.
HTH
Regards
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