Y26.org

Problem with rm command

6/20/2008

So in trying to clear out a *large* number of emails (>200k) from one our shared folders here at work I ran into the following issue:


[jwalters@helmsdeep]~/ rm -f 9*
-bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long


To get around the buffer limitation I ran the following:


find . -name '9*' | xargs rm -f


Since raw emails are just a string of numbers I had to run that on all the strings replacing 9 with other numbers. Here is a better explanation of the limitation. Not really related to rm but to the kernel itself. Fairly technical read so beware ;-).