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
These shouldn't make any difference. The limit is on the size of the expanded shell command line. The original example won't cause it. The ones that expand a list with a * or the output of ls may. The right solution is to let rm recurse with -r or to potentially long list to xargs.