On Tue, 2004-06-29 at 12:03, Terry Collins wrote: > Peter Hardy wrote: > > > cd /var/spool/mqueue; ls | xargs rm > > Doesn't it barf on the ls with the same message?
You had me worried for a minute. :-) [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ mkdir tmp [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ cd tmp [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/tmp$ for filename in `seq 1 50000`; do touch $filename; done *go and have lunch* [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/tmp$ rm * bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/tmp$ ls | xargs rm [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/tmp$ ls [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/tmp$ ls doesn't actually deal with any arguments, it's basically just dumping the contents of the . inode to stdout. (note: claim may be wildly inaccurate and simplistic) And just to add to the obscure ls arguments thread, I just discovered -1, to output one filename per line. I've never needed this, as GNU ls seems to default to that when it's outputting to a pipe. But it's good to know! -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
