Les Mikesell wrote:
On 1/26/2010 11:42 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:
On Mon, January 25, 2010 13:40, Les Mikesell wrote: .
I'd say it is more likely that the command that resulted in an error wasn't exactly what was posted or there is a filesystem problem.
I do not consider a file system issue, as in error or corruption, highly probable in this case. It might be, however, that something returned by the find caused rm itself to choke.
Causing one instance of the per-file rm invocations to choke shouldn't bother the rest. And while file system corruption isn't likely, it is still a possible cause of generally-strange behavior. The most probable thing still seems like there was an unquoted * on the line that was actually typed when the error was reported.
Indeed, upon closer examination, that message:
-bash: /usr/bin/find: Argument list too long
came from the login shell, not from 'find', and indicates that the shell got a failure return with errno==E2BIG when it tried to exec() /usr/bin/find. The 'find' command was never executed.