Hawaii Linux Institute wrote:
Matt Darnell wrote:
Aloha,
We have a box with over 500,000 files in a direcotry. If I try 'rm
m*' I get
an error, something like 'too many arguments'
I think someone else in this situation had a method of switching to
another
shell, bash is default.
All the files start with mgetty. I would like to prserve the other
files in
the directory and the directories below /var/log
Anyone have any ideas?
There is nothing wrong with bash. The problem is, bash will evaluate
the wildcard first and then turn your 500,000 files into a huge number
of arguments for the rm command (thus the "too many arguments" error)
The easiest way is do this one at a time, & I am sure everyone here
knows how to do this. For example:
for i in m*; do rm m*; done
still requires bash to glob all 500,000 files. Fails for the same reaons.
Jim
