On Mon, Mar 19, 2007 at 03:39:19PM -0600, Michael L Torrie wrote: > > find *.txt | while read f; do rm "$f" ; done > > That avoids the problem of the commandline being too long (shell > expansion will sometimes cause your command to fail if there are too > many files.
Cool, I like the pipe while approach. But does what you wrote really avoid the command-line being too long? Wouldn't you have to write this instead?: find -name "*.txt" | while read f; do rm "$f" ; done It's a subtle difference, but I believe what you wrote above could still have the problem since the *.txt would be expanded by the shell before being passed to find. Phillip P.S. Of course, there is another difference which is that what I wrote does a recursive search. So to prevent that you can do: find -name "*.txt" -maxdepth 1 | while read f; do rm "$f" ; done -- Phillip Hellewell <phillip AT hellewell.homeip.net> -------------------- 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
