Hans - don't giggle. :) On Mar 19, 2007, at 11:16 AM, Eduardo Sanz-Garcia wrote:
> Today I have tried to remove 3500 files at once using the argument > expantion of bash: "rm *.txt" > There was an error: > *bash: /bin/mv: Argument list too long > *Here is the explanation and the workaround: >> However, it is one that is easily worked around >> using the supplied utilities. Please review the documentation on >> 'find' >> and 'xargs' for one possible combination of programs that work well. >> >> Here is an example using chmod where exceeding ARG_MAX argument >> length >> is avoided. >> >> find htdocs -name '*.html' -print0 | xargs -0 chmod a+r There is one thing to note here: Using alternative methods to delete or alter large lists of items can result in VERY undesirable results if you have spaces in your pathnames. i.e: find -name ".svn" . | xargs rm -rf What I MEANT to do was to prune out all the .svn directories from a source tree. What HAPPENED is that it deleted the whole source tree because of a space in my path. Just something to keep in mind. -- Kimball -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
