Tks all, problem solved. It's marvellous how Unix/Linux is a contant
learning curve.
--
Howard.
______________________________________________________
LANNet Computing Associates <http://www.lannet.com.au>
On Tue, 29 Aug 2000, Andrew Reilly wrote:
> 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.
>
>
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