On Oct 17, 2008, at 7:58 PM, thad wrote:
Satchel Paige - "Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you."
On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 4:36 AM, Laurent Wandrebeck l.wandrebeck@gmail.com wrote:
2008/10/17 Jussi Hirvi greenspot@greenspot.fi:
Since when is there a limit in how long directory listings CentOS can show (ls), or how large directories can be removed (rm). It is really annoying to say, for example
rm -rf /var/amavis/tmp
and get only "argument list too long" as feedback.
Is there a way to go round this problem?
I have CentOS 5.2.
- Jussi
try something like: for i in /var/amavis/tmp/* do rm -rf $i done
it should be:
for i in `ls /var/amavis/tmp` do rm $i done _______________________________________________
Taking into account the valid objections others have mentioned, such as problems of embedded whitespace in names, rm -rf $i and rm $i above are not the same. Even if there are no directories under the /var/amavis/tmp/, depending on aliases, etc, rm $i may prompt you for confirmation. the other will go ahead and do the remove if you have permission to do it (or at least the -f).
The -r for files is unnecessary, and offends me when I see people do it, but doesn't really cause any harm :)
I personally either rm -rf directory, and recreate the directory if necessary, or do a find /var/amavis/tmp -type f ... because of experience through the years with too long of command lines. Unixes in the past had even smaller limits. xargs most frequently, and if things fail, I may just do -exec rm -f {} ; on the find.