On Tue, Aug 29, 2000 at 09:32:51AM +1100, Howard Lowndes wrote:
> I have managed to runout of inodes on a partition du to a buggy routine.
>
> I know what I want to delete, but when I do rm -f * in the problem
> directory it comes back with "Argument list too long"
>
> Can anyone think of a way around this one?
find . -delete
for modern values of find.
find . -exec rm \{\}\;
or
find . -print0 | xargs -0 rm
for old values of find.
The problem is that shells usually have a command line buffer limit of
around 10k bytes, and in a very full directory * might expand to
something longer than that. find operates iteratively, so it
never tries to collect the whole list at once, so the problem
doesn't occur.
Learn the last pattern. find/xargs is your friend.
--
Andrew
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