Jon Nichols wrote:
> when i want to nuke a huge number of files in a given directory, i will usually use
>globbing, something like, 'rm *March*'
>
> sometimes, in directories with hundreds of thousands of files
> i'll try a big glob rm and get an error like 'Arguments too long'.
find . -name '*March*' -exec rm {} \;
or:
find . -name '*March*' -print | xargs rm
Be aware that using find in this way will not only nuke '*March*' in the
current directory, but subdirectories as well. If you want to change
that, use:
find . -maxdepth 1 ....
You might want to set up an alias if you use it a lot. Put this in your
bashrc, if you use bash:
bigrm() {
find . -maxdepth 1 -name "$1" -print | xargs rm
}
use: bigrm '*March*'
The quotes are important.
> What determines how long that argument list can be, and could it be temporarily
>changed for similar purposes?
I think it's fixed (set at compile time). Not certain, though...
MSG
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