From owner-freebsd-questions  Tue Sep 10 11:40:59 2002
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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>
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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